Encounter
We were riding through frozen fields in a wagon at dawn.
A red wing rose in the darkness.
And suddenly a hare ran across the road.
One of us pointed to it with his hand.
That was long ago. Today neither of them is alive,
Not the hare, nor the man who made the gesture.
O my love, where are they, where are they going
The flash of a hand, streak of movement, rustle of pebbles.
I ask not out of sorrow, but in wonder.
Wilno, 1936
Notes
Where Wisława Szymborska observed the slow, amnesiac labor of clearing the battlefield's rubble so life could blindly resume, Czesław Miłosz revisits a frozen morning at dawn, watching a wild hare bolt across the cart tracks only to vanish into the frost of decades past. The speaking subject exposes the fragile velocity of human perception, showing how consciousness clings to a single fleeting gesture of life against the vast erasure of time, asking where those witnesses and running paws have gone when neither nostalgia nor intellect can summon the morning back into presence. It anchors September’s theme of Echo in the bittersweet brevity of our passing encounters, reminding us that repetition is often just the mind reaching across an unbridgeable distance, clutching at the sudden, glowing trace of a world that vanished the very instant it was beheld. #September #CzeslawMilosz #Echo #Time #Life
“Encounter” from The Collected Poems 1931-1987 by Czeslaw Milosz. Copyright © 1988 by Czeslaw Milosz Royalties, Inc.