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Let's read the poem together: “The city I would like to live in” by Adam Zagajewski

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Summary

Peace lives when democracy lives.

Peace reigns when we are first at peace with ourselves.

Football matches that should be the spectacle of eleven friends playing with the ball become moments in which repressed individuals, alone in their own ego, give vent to the most murky macabre fantasies of death and destruction.

Palaces in which democracy should be the bulwark of a nation's peace become the laughing stock and the pigsty where one can expose one's anger, where one can vent one's most hidden frustrations and where one can give rise to the most vulgarity.

Let's learn to speak less, and speak well, to speak well. Let's learn to to listen.

In the silence of peace, in the calm tones of democracy there is room for everyone: no one is excluded.

Adam Zagajewski (Lviv, 21 June 1945 – Krakow, 21 March 2021) wasa Polish poet, writer and essayist.Adam Zagajewski was born in Lviv in 1945. Due to the Soviet post-World War II program, in the same year the Zagajewski family was forced to move to Gliwice, in the …View more
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Let's read together:

It's a silent city at dusk,
when pale stars come to their senses,
and at midday sonorous for voices
of ambitious philosophers and merchants
who brought velvets from the East.

The fires of conversation burn there
certainly not the fires.
The old churches, the mossy stones
of ancient prayers are its ballast
and his rocket headed towards the cosmos.

It is an impartial city
who does not condemn foreigners,
a city that quickly remembers
and slowly forgets,
who tolerates poets and forgives prophets
the lack of humor.

It is a built city
based on Chopin's preludes,
from which he took only joy and sadness.
A large ring of hills
surrounds it; they grow there
the field ash trees and the slender poplar
who is the judge of the tree people.

A lively river flowing through it
night and day it whispers
incomprehensible greetings
of the springs, of the mountains, of the sky.