Love, by Czeslaw Milosz

The same person who wrote the political and psychological Captive Mind also wrote simple, straightforward poems, like this. Milosz, who defected from the Soviet realm,  won the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1980.

For the broken-hearted.



Love


Love means to learn to look at yourself

The way one looks at distant things

For you are only one thing among many.

And whoever sees that way heals his heart,

Without knowing it, from various ills—

A bird and a tree say to him: Friend.



Then he wants to use himself and things

So that they stand in the glow of ripeness.

It doesn’t matter whether he knows what he serves:

Who serves best doesn’t always understand.