By Wislawa Szymborska, the Polish Nobel Prize poet

Return Baggage
The cemetery plot for tiny graves.
We, the long-lived, pass by furtively,
like wealthy people passing slums.
Here lie little Zosia, Jacek, Dominik,
prematurely stripped of the sun, the moon,
the clouds, the turning seasons.
They didn't stash much in their return bags.
Some scraps of sights
that scarcely count as plural.
A fistful of air with a butterfly flitting.
A spoonful of bitter knowledge - the taste of medicine.
Small-scale naughtiness,
granted, some of it fatal.
Gaily chasing the ball across the road.
The happiness of skating on thin ice.
This one here, that one down there, those on the end:
before they grew to reach a doorknob,
break a watch,
smash their first windowpane.
Malgorzata, four years old,
two of them spent staring at the ceiling.
Rafalek, missed his first birthday by a month,
and Zuzia missed Christmas,
when misty breath turns to frost.
And what can you say about one day of life,
a minute, a second:
darkness, a light bulb's flash, then dark again?
KOSMOS MARKOS
CHRONOS PARADOKSOS:
Only stony Greek has words for that.