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Foundations

I built on the sand
And it tumbled down,
I built on a rock
And it tumbled down.
Now when I build,
I shall begin
With the smoke from the chimney.

-Leopold Staff, 1965

I Can't Help You

Poor moth, I can't help you,
I can only turn out the light.

-Ryszard Krynicki, 1991

I think that someone asked me where I got these poems. Once. A long time ago. The answer, more often than not, is that I grab books or flip through the Poetry Foundation website, but the book I grab a disproportionate amount of the time is "A Book of Luminous Things", an anthology edited by poet and Nobel laureate Czeslaw Milosz. If you own only one poetry anthology, I would hazard the suggestion that it be this one. I don't know where my copy came from, or when I obtained it, but I do know that it is very good: the poems are approachable, varied, and across-the-board wonderful. Here are two of them (this poem is the most recent example of another), but over the years several poems from that book have made their way into this blog. That doesn't mean it isn't worth owning your own copy, if that's something you're interested in.