Campo dei Fiori by Czeslaw Milosz
Campo dei Fiori
Translated by Louis Iribarne
(Milosz's famous poem has been described as 'one of the most moving tributes to the Holocaust victims ever written.')
In Rome on the Campo
dei Fiori
baskets of olives and
lemons,
cobbles spattered with
wine
and the wreckage of
flowers.
Vendors cover the
trestles
with rose-pink fish;
armfuls of dark grapes
heaped on peach-down.
On this same square
they burned Giordano
Bruno.
Henchmen kindled the
pyre
close-pressed by the
mob.
Before the flames had
died
the taverns were full
again,
baskets of olives and
lemons
again on the vendors'
shoulders.
I thought of the Campo
dei Fiori
in Warsaw by the
sky-carousel
one clear spring
evening
to the strains of a
carnival tune.
The bright melody
drowned
the salvos from the
ghetto wall,
and couples were
flying
high in the cloudless
sky.
At times wind from the
burning
would drift dark kites
along
and riders on the
carousel
caught petals in
midair.
That same hot wind
blew open the skirts
of the girls
and the crowds were
laughing
on that beautiful
Warsaw Sunday.
Someone will read as
moral
that the people of
Rome or Warsaw
haggle, laugh, make
love
as they pass by the
martyrs' pyres.
Someone else will read
of the passing of
things human,
of the oblivion
born before the flames
have died.
But that day I thought
only
of the loneliness of
the dying,
of how, when Giordano
climbed to his burning
he could not find
in any human tongue
words for mankind,
mankind who live on.
Already they were back
at their wine
or peddled their white
starfish,
baskets of olives and
lemons
they had shouldered to
the fair,
and he already
distanced
as if centuries had passed
while they paused just
a moment
for his flying in the
fire.
Those dying here, the
lonely
forgotten by the
world,
our tongue becomes for
them
the language of an
ancient planet.
Until, when all is
legend
and many years have
passed,
on a new Campo dei
Fiori
rage will kindle at a
poet's word.
Warsaw, 1943
Campo dei Fiori by
Czeslaw Milosz from The Collected Poems: 1931-1987.
