After every war
someone has to clean up.
Things won’t
straighten themselves up, after all.
Someone has to push the rubble
to the side of the road,
so the corpse-filled wagons
can pass.
Author: Wislawa Szymborska
Wislawa Szymborska (pron. Vishwava Zhimborska) was born in Poland in 1923. She lived through the Germans' occupation of Poland (and defied them by going to illegal classes). Then she lived under an oppressive Communist regime - not always pleasing its officials with her poetry. In 1996 she was awarded the Nobel Prize for Literature , one of the few women to receive it. Szymborska died at home in Kraków in 2012, aged 88.