Maybe All This

Posted 10 April 2014

A poem written by the Polish poet and Nobel Laureate Wisława Szymborska-Włodek and translated by Clare Cavanagh and Stanislaw Baranczak. It was first published in the New Yorker in 1992 where it soon became one of her most well-known pieces. The poem itself is brilliant. It invokes the sentiment that we – like the little organisms in our petri dishes and flasks – are an experiment of sorts: either unguided like evolution with its tension between repeatability and contingency; or acted upon by experimenters who are enraptured by both the monumental and the mundane.

10 April 2014

Maybe All This

by Wisława Szymborska-Włodek

Maybe all this
is happening in some lab?
Under one lamp by day
and billions by night?

Maybe we’re experimental generations?
Poured from one vial to the next,
shaken in test tubes,
not scrutinized by eyes alone,
each of us separately
plucked up by tweezers in the end?

Or maybe it’s more like this:
No interference?
The changes occur on their own
according to plan?
The graph’s needle slowly etches
its predictable zigzags?

Maybe thus far we aren’t of much interest?
The control monitors aren’t really plugged in?
Only for wars, preferably large ones,
for the odd ascent above our clump of earth,
for major migrations from Point A to Point B?

Maybe just the opposite:
They’ve got a taste for trivia up there?
Look, on the big screen a little girl
is sewing a button on her sleeve.
The radar shrieks,
the staff comes at a run.
What a darling little being
with its tiny heart beating inside it!
How sweet its solemn
threading of the needle!
Someone cries, enraptured,
Get the Boss,
tell him he’s got to see this for himself!