August 15, 2004

Czeslaw Milosz (1911-2004)

        In the mid '50's Horsefeathers read the first challenge to his youthful left wing utopian political fantasies. It was The Captive Mind, by the Polish writer Czeslaw Milosz and, like Orwell, but with first hand knowledge, he described totalitarian barbarism in pursuit of utopian goals. More than that, Milosz made clear that totalitarianim wants and needs to control the minds of its subjects. Now that we are engaged in World War IV with the new totalitarians- Jew and Christian hating followers of Islam, Milosz's stilled voice will continue to speak to us. Milosz was a resident of Warsaw during the Nazi occupation. He witnessed the destruction of the ghetto and published the following poem in an underground newspaper on the first anniversary of the ghetto revolt, April 19, 1944. The title, Campo dei Fiori, is a reference to the market place in Rome where, in 1600, the heretic Giordano Bruno was burned at the stake by order of the Inquisition.

Campo dei Fiori

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.

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.