Wisława Szymborska - View With a Grain of Sand lyrics

We call it a grain of sand, but it calls itself neither grain nor sand. It does just fine, without a name, whether general, particular, permanent, pa**ing, incorrect, or apt. Our glance, our touch means nothing to it. It doesn't feel itself seen and touched. And that it fell on the windowsill is only our experience, not its. For it, it is not different from falling on anything else with no a**urance that it has finished falling or that it is falling still. The window has a wonderful view of a lake, but the view doesn't view itself. It exists in this world colorless, shapeless, soundless, odorless, and painless. The lake's floor exists floorlessly, and its shore exists shorelessly. The water feels itself neither wet nor dry and its waves to themselves are neither singular nor plural. They splash deaf to their own noise on pebbles neither large nor small. And all this beneath a sky by nature skyless in which the sun sets without setting at all and hides without hiding behind an unminding cloud. The wind ruffles it, its only reason being that it blows. A second pa**es. A second second. A third. But they're three seconds only for us. Time has pa**ed like courier with urgent news. But that's just our simile. The character is inverted, his haste is make-believe, his news inhuman.