Thank You, My Fate

Great humility fills me,
great purity fills me,
I make love with my dear
as if I made love dying
as if I made love praying,
tears pour
over my arms and his arms.
I don’t know whether this is joy
or sadness. I don’t understand
what I feel, I’m crying,
I’m crying, it’s humility
as if I were dead, gratitude,
I thank you, my fate,
I’m unworthy, how beautiful
my life.

The Greatest Love

She is sixty. She lives
the greatest love of her life.

She walks arm in arm with her dear one,
her hair streams in the wind.
Her dear one says:
“You have hair like pearls.”

Her children say:
“Old fool.”

Anna Świrszczyńska (also known as Anna Swir) 1909–1984 was a Polish poet. She grew up in poverty as the daughter of an artist and began publishing her poems in the 1930s. She joined the Polish resistance during WWII and once waited 60 minutes to be executed. In 1974 she published Building the Barricade, a volume which describes the suffering she witnessed and experienced during that time. She also writes frankly about the female body in various stages of life. (Wikipedia)

It is sometimes philosophically fashionable to say that this world is just an illusion, a pale imitation of Reality. Earthly sights and pleasures and sensations are ‘maya,’ snares to the feet of those on a spiritual path. Platonic or agape is the ‘true’ love and anything that tastes too much of the physical is regarded as ‘lesser than.’

But for many of us, it is the sensations of the earth, the awareness of the physical, the experience of human love that offers a portal to the divine and is therefore to be respected and honored. In loving the creations do we not learn to know and love the Creator?

In these two fine poems by Polish writer Anna Swir we enter the world of the woman at different ages of life. What is common in both is the capacity for love and the divine component it can create within the heart. It is not important who or what you love but that you are capable of love, for in loving one learns gratitude and humility and tastes joy.