« The Innocent: Previous post


The Three Oddest Words

| Posted on: January 16th, 2008 | Categories: Poetry, Personal, Creativity |
Other related posts and pages: |Fortunate | Word cloud | Wordle, McCain v.s. Obama | Palindromic Poetry | Word cloud, redux |


A poem by Wislawa Szymborska
Translated by S. Baranczak & C. Cavanagh

When I pronounce the word Future,
the first syllable already belongs to the past.

When I pronounce the word Silence,
I destroy it.

When I pronounce the word Nothing,
I make something no non-being can hold.




I was introduced to Wislawa Szymborska’s poetry by a story on NPR. The one above is one of my favorites, playing as it does self-referentially with language. More examples of her poetry can be found here


| Posted on: January 16th, 2008
Other related posts and pages: |Fortunate | Word cloud | Wordle, McCain v.s. Obama | Palindromic Poetry | Word cloud, redux |


You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed.
You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.

 

Leave a Reply


« The Innocent: Previous post