“There were no words
In any human tongue
To be left for mankind,
Mankind who live on.”

—  Czeslaw Milosz

Rescue (1945)
Context: Someone will read as moral
That the people of Rome or Warsaw
Haggle, laugh, make love
As they pass by martyrs' pyres.
Someone else will read
Of the passing of things human,
Of the oblivion
Born before the flames have died. But that day I thought only
Of the loneliness of the dying,
Of how, when Giordano
Climbed to his burning
There were no words
In any human tongue
To be left for mankind,
Mankind who live on.

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Czeslaw Milosz photo
Czeslaw Milosz 106
Polish, poet, diplomat, prosaist, writer, and translator 1911–2004

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