Facing the River

Czesław Miłosz · 1994 CE · Poem · Polish · Contemporary

Fifty years after leaving, the poet stands on the bank of the Nevėžis in a Lithuania that is a country again, finds the manor gone and the church still standing, and reads names off stones. Other poems take up old age, the indecency of outliving almost everyone he began with, and the accounting that a long memory finally presents. Written in his eighties and the last full collection before he moved back to Kraków for good.

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