Maternity

I gave birth to life.
It went out of my entrails
and asks for the sacrifice of my life
as does an Aztec deity.
I lean over a little puppet,
we look at each other
with four eyes.

“You are not going to defeat me,” I say.
“I won’t be an egg which you would crack
in a hurry for the world,
a footbridge that you would take on the way to your life.
I will defend myself.”

I lean over a little puppet,
I notice
a tiny movement of a tiny finger
which a little while ago was still in me,
in which, under a thin skin,
my own blood flows.
And suddenly I am flooded
by a high, luminous wave
of humility.
Powerless, I drown.

Do I thus adore myself
in the fruit of my flesh
do I offer myself for a sacrifice
to a cannibal god of instinct
Where will I get the strength to resist
what is so weak?

Necessary for the little puppet as air,
I let myself unresisting be swallowed by love
as the air lets itself be swallowed
by these tiny life-starved lungs.

Polish; trans. Czeslaw Milosz & Leonard Nathan