Wislawa Szymborska – Conversation with a Stone

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Have you ever tried to have a conversation with a stone? How did it go? Is there anything more densely resolute, more coldly mute as a conversation partner than a hard stone? Which is why I find this poem so fascinating, so impressive in the poet’s unwavering determination to do the impossible and to break down the stone’s staunch stone-ness, innocent like a child on the one hand and cunningly manipulative on the other. And in the conversation, there’s this beautifully dropped and quite mysterious seed of wisdom “No other sense can make up for your missing sense of taking part.“ What does the stone mean by this? What does the stone know that we don’t about ‘the sense of taking part’ and what a key to enlightened living this is? Wislawa Szymborska won the Nobel Prize for poetry in 1996 and was described by Robert Hass as “unquestionably one of the great living European poets”.

Conversation with a Stone

I knock at the stone’s front door.
It’s only me, let me come in.
I want to enter your insides,
have a look round,
breathe my fill of you.”

“Go away, ” says the stone.
“I’m shut tight.
Even if you break me to pieces,
we’ll all still be closed.
You can grind us to sand,
we still won’t let you in.”

I knock at the stone’s front door.
“It’s only me, let me come in.
I’ve come out of pure curiosity.
Only life can quench it.
I mean to stroll through your palace,
then go calling on a leaf, a drop of water.
I don’t have much time.
My mortality should touch you.”

“I’m made of stone, ” says the stone,
“and must therefore keep a straight face.
Go away.
I don’t have the muscles to laugh.”

I knock at the stone’s front door.
“It’s only me, let me come in.
I hear you have great empty halls inside you,
unseen, their beauty in vain,
soundless, not echoing anyone’s steps.
Admit you don’t know them well yourself.”

“Great and empty, true enough, ” says the stone,
“But there isn’t any room.
Beautiful, perhaps, but not to the taste
of your poor senses.
You may get to know me, but you’ll never know me through.
My whole surface is turned toward you,
all my insides turned away.”

I knock at the stone’s front door.
“It’s only me, let me come in.
I don’t seek refuge for eternity.
I’m not unhappy.
I’m not homeless.
My world is worth returning to.
I’ll enter and exit empty-handed.
And my proof I was there
will be only words,
which no one will believe.”

“You shall not enter, ” says the stone.
“You lack the sense of taking part.
No other sense can make up for your missing sense of taking part.
Even sight heightened to become all-seeing
will do you no good without a sense of taking part.
You shall not enter, you have only a sense of what that sense should be,
only its seed, imagination.”

I knock at the stone’s front door.
“It’s only me, let me come in.
I haven’t got two thousand centuries,
so let me come under your roof.”

“If you don’t believe me, ” says the stone,
“just ask the leaf, it will tell you the same.
Ask a drop of water, it will tell you what the leaf has said.
And, finally, ask a hair from your own head.
I am bursting with laughter, yes, vast laughter,
although I don’t know how to laugh.”

I knock at the stone’s front door.
“It’s only me, let me come in.”

“I don’t have a door, ” says the stone.