breast – NICOLA CAROLI |

As I was helping my friend Judith to look for a poem for her art class, I came across this poem by the Polish poet Adam Zagajewski. I had once dedicated a whole year to his poetry when I still ran my interdisciplinary art space wortwedding. At that time I read all his poems and prose that were available in translation. When I checked on my book shelves and found this poem, it was like reading it for the first time. Here’s to repetitions and new beginnings.

Where the breath is

She stands alone onstage
and has no instrument.

She lays her palms upon her breast,
where the breath is born
and where it dies.

The palms do not sing
nor does the breast.

What sings is what stays silent.

Source: Adam Zagajewski, Selected Poems, Faber and Faber Ltd, 2004

I’d like to share a poem that not only features breathing but is entirely about breathing. It’s by the great American poet Elizabeth Bishop (1911-1979).

IV/O Breath
Beneath that loved and celebrated breast,
silent, bored really blindly veined,
grieves, maybe lives and lets
live, passes bets,
something moving but invisibly,
and with what clamor why restrained
I cannot fathom even a ripple.
(See the thin flying of nine black hairs
four around one five the other nipple,
flying almost intolerably on your own breath.)
Equivocal, but what we have in common’s bound to be there,
whatever we must own equivalents for,
something that maybe I could bargain with
and make a separate peace beneath
within if never with.

Source: Elizabeth Bishop, from “Four Poems”, Complete Poems, Chatto & Windus 1991

from Elizabeth Bishop

Tag: breast

“Where the breath is”

“Beneath that loved and celebrated breast”