Visual Metaphor：From Sky to the Sky

 

The Sky – Wislawa Szymborska

“We should have started from this: the sky.

A window without a sill, frame, or pane.

An opening and nothing more,

but open wide.//

I need not wait for a clear night

nor crane my neck

to examine the sky.

I have the sky at my back, at hand, and on my eyelids.

The sky wraps me snugly

and lifts me from below.//

An object falling into a precipice

falls from the sky into sky.//

Granular, liquid, craggy,

fiery and volatile

expanses of sky, crumbs of sky,

puffs and snatches of sky.

The sky is omnipresent

even in darkness under the skin.

I eat sky, I excrete sky.

I am a trap inside a trap,

an inhabited inhabitant,

an embraced embrace,

a question in answer to a question.//

To divide earth and sky

is not the correct way

to consider this whole.

It merely allows survival

under a more precise address,

quicker to be found

if I were to be looked up.

My call words

are delight and despair.”