Second Space

Concerned with questions of aging and mortality, A Second Space furthers 93-year-old Nobel laureate Czeslaw Milosz’s reputation as “arguably the greatest living poet” (Edward Hirsch, New York Times Book Review).

“Milosz continues exploring his own version of the meditative lyric, refusing to rest on his laurels…. Consequently, he joins the ranks of other great poets of old age, such as Robert Penn Warren and W. B. Yeats himself.”—The New York Times Book Review

A SECOND SPACE

How spacious are the heavenly halls!

Approach them on aerial stairs.

Above white clouds, there are the hanging gardens of paradise.

A soul detaches itself from the body and soars.

It remembers that there is an up and a down.

Have we really lost faith in the second space?

And they’ve dissolved, disappeared, both heaven and hell?

Without unearthly meadows how to meet salvation?

And where will an association of the damned fill its abode?

Let us weep, lament the enormity of the loss.

Let us smear our faces with coal, loosen our hair.

Let us inplore that it be returned to us,

That second space.