Reality demands that we also mention this:
Life goes on.
It continues at Cannae and Borodino, at Kosovo Polje and Guernica.
There's a gas station on a little square in Jericho,
and wet paint on park benches in Bila Hora.
Letters fly back and forth between Pearl Harbor and Hastings,
a moving van passes beneath the eye of the lion at Chaeronea,
and the blooming orchards near Verdun
cannot escape the approaching atmospheric front.
There is so much Everything that Nothing is hidden quite nicely.
Music pours from the yachts moored at Actium
and couples dance on their sunlit decks.
So much is always going on, that it must be going on all over.
Where not a stone still stands,
you see the Ice Cream Man besieged by children.
Where Hiroshima had been Hiroshima is again,
producing many products for everyday use.
This terrifying world is not devoid of charms,
of the mornings that make waking up worthwhile.
The grass is green on Maciejowice's fields,
and it is studded with dew, as is normal with grass.
Perhaps all fields are battlefields,
those we remember and those that are forgotten:
the birch forests and the cedar forests,
the snow and the sand, the iridescent swamps
and the canyons of black defeat,
where now, when the need strikes, you don't cower
under a bush but squat behind it.
What moral flows from this? Probably none.
Only the blood flows, drying quickly,
and, as always, a few rivers, a few clouds.
On tragic mountain passes the wind rips hats from unwitting heads
and we can't help laughing at that.