Adrienne, I am like the closed mouth of an hourglass, twenty centuries with their million or so ancestors pressing down upon me, with the weight of their longings and their loves.

But I am closed until you take me in your arms, into your bed, and place me on the mantle of your heart, so that time, which is our blood combined, can flow again for twenty centuries or more.

I gave birth to life. It went out of my entrails and asks for the sacrifice of my life as does an Aztec deity. I lean over a little puppet, we look at each other with four eyes.

"You are not going to defeat me," I say "I won't be an egg which you would crack in a hurry for the world, a footbridge that you would take on the way to your life. I will defend myself."

I lean over a little puppet, I notice a tiny movement of a tiny finger which a little while ago was still in me, in which, under a thin skin, my own blood flows. And suddenly I am flooded by a high, luminous wave of humility. Powerless, I drown.

(Translated from the Polish by Czeslaw Milosz and Leonard Nathan)

Note: Discovered this poem in an anthology of poems put out the Copper Canyon Press titled "The Poet's Child". Milosz was a very big fan of Ana Swir, and given the resonances these two poets share, one can see why.