Callings (Bruce Ray Smith)

“She was not an eminent poet,” Czesław Miłosz says of his fellow Pole Anna Kamienska. “But that is just: A good person will not learn the wiles of art.”

Needless to say, this is a complex, even sly, assertion. Miłosz is both expansive and uneasy, proud and humbled at once, about his gift, his calling. But he accepts it, his calling to be a poet. He is certain in a simpler way that Anna Kamienska believed and loved her Lord in the midst of suffering and bewilderment and that that, whatever else God gives us, is the one clear way each one of us is called to live on earth.

There is one more thing which must be said. Kamienska’s poem, “A Prayer That Will Be Answered,” is so beautiful, so right and good, she need not ever have written another word:

Lord, let me suffer much
and then die

Let me walk through silence
and leave nothing behind not even fear

Make the world continue
let the ocean kiss the sand just as before

Let the grass stay green
so that the frogs can hide in it

so that someone can bury his face in it
and sob out his love

Make the day rise brightly
as if there were no more pain

And let my poem stand clear as a windowpane
bumped by a bumblebee’s head