Artificer Poem by Czeslaw Milosz

Artificer

Rating: 3.0


Burning, he walks in the stream of flickering letters, clarinets,
machines throbbing quicker than the heart, lopped-off heads, silk
canvases, and he stops under the sky

and raises toward it his joined clenched fists.

Believers fall on their bellies, they suppose it is a monstrance that
shines,

but those are knuckles, sharp knuckles shine that way, my friends.

He cuts the glowing, yellow buildings in two, breaks the walls into
motley halves;
pensive, he looks at the honey seeping from those huge honeycombs:
throbs of pianos, children's cries, the thud of a head banging against
the floor.
This is the only landscape able to make him feel.

He wonders at his brother's skull shaped like an egg,
every day he shoves back his black hair from his brow,
then one day he plants a big load of dynamite
and is surprised that afterward everything spouts up in the explosion.
Agape, he observes the clouds and what is hanging in them:
globes, penal codes, dead cats floating on their backs, locomotives.
They turn in the skeins of white clouds like trash in a puddle.
While below on the earth a banner, the color of a romantic rose,
flutters,
and a long row of military trains crawls on the weed-covered tracks.

COMMENTS OF THE POEM
Mahtab Bangalee 05 July 2020

one day he plants a big load of dynamite and is surprised that afterward everything spouts up in the explosion.......world, now in the crazy movement of superpower; explosion in the breast of humanity is easy work; soldiers and general peoples deaths are hilarious to the hypocrite warrior politicians; future of the world is very cruel in the hands of war monger leaders...poet greatly written this

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Dr Antony Theodore 05 July 2020

He wonders at his brother's skull shaped like an egg, every day he shoves back his black hair from his brow, then one day he plants a big load of dynamite and is surprised that afterward everything spouts up in the explosion. Expressions that goes so deep. tony

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Susan Williams 05 July 2020

Powerful. It is like Picasso using words instead of oil to paint a picture and tell a story and doing so in his painfully [and pain-filled] intense manner. I am awed by his skill and depth..

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Paul Amrod 05 July 2020

For me this is a form of bizarre expressionism which I do enjoy. Very stark images and fascination results.

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Edward Kofi Louis 05 July 2020

Weed-covered tracks! ! Silk and milk, With the muse of the military. Thanks for sharing this poem with us.

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