Gift
 by Czeslaw Milosz

A day so happy.

Fog lifted early, I walked in the garden.

Hummingbirds were stopping over honeysuckle flowers.

There was no thing on earth I wanted to possess.

I knew no one worth my envying him.

Whatever evil I had suffered, I forgot.

To think that once I was the same man did not embarrass me.

In my body I felt no pain.

When straightening up, I saw the blue sea and sails.
 

Czeslaw Milosz, winner of the Nobel Prize for Literature, was born in Lithuania and grew up in Poland. He is known as a poet of truth -- his visions of war are harrowing portraits of suffering, of humanity somehow coming through inhumanity, and vice versa. He lives and teaches in Berkeley.