Forgive Me, Coincidence
Every Thursday, I post a poetry-writing prompt here on the site. This weekly tradition is designed to help you explore new ideas, experiment with different writing techniques, and expand your literary horizons. My aim is to provide you with thought-provoking themes, intriguing images, or captivating wordplay that will stimulate your artistic senses. You are free to interpret the prompt in any way you like and express yourself through poetry or creative writing.
This week I want to take you somewhere different. We've spent recent weeks in kitchens and gardens and the quiet American landscape — with poets who taught us to slow down and look. Today we're going to Kraków, to a woman who wrote about the same enormous subjects — death, love, history, being alive at all — but who approached them sideways, with a raised eyebrow and a perfectly straight face.
Wisława Szymborska won the Nobel Prize in 1996 and appeared to find the whole thing mildly embarrassing. In her Nobel lecture she argued that the most important phrase any poet can say is I don't know — that inspiration is simply the refusal to stop being surprised.
The Poet Who Made Wonder Funny
Wisława Szymborska was born in 1923 in western Poland and spent nearly her whole adult life in Kraków. She lived through the Nazi occupation, the war, and four decades of Communist rule. Her earliest published work was written under the constraints of Stalinist state doctrine, and she later disowned it entirely — a rare and clarifying act of honesty for a poet of her generation.
What she built afterward was something almost no one else was making: poems that treat the largest philosophical questions with the light touch of good conversation. She wrote about the dinosaurs and the Vermeer painting and the terrorist's bomb and the onion and her own cat, and she never once sounded like she was lecturing you. She worked for decades as a poetry editor at a literary weekly and wrote a book review column so charming it was collected into volumes of its own.
She published fewer than four hundred poems in her lifetime. Asked why so few, she said she had a wastebasket at home. She hated giving interviews, hated the fame the Nobel brought her, and reportedly referred to winning it as her Stockholm tragedy. She chain-smoked, made collages for her friends, and kept working until she died in 2012.
Her poems are proof that seriousness and playfulness are not opposites. In her hands, they're the same instrument.
The Szymborska Essence
Wisława Szymborska's poetry is built on a few recognizable foundations:
The tilted premise — she starts from a strange proposition and follows it with perfect logic: what if this photograph could be stopped, what if the cat is the one grieving, what would statistics say about human nature
Irony that protects tenderness — the wit is never cruel; it's a way of approaching enormous feeling without crushing it, and the feeling always arrives anyway
The cosmic zoom — she moves between the human scale and the geological one in a single stanza, making our small concerns both absurd and unbearably precious
Questions posed to no one — she interrogates history, chance, the universe, and the reader with the same unbothered curiosity
The plainspoken paradox — her language is conversational and clear, which makes her sudden reversals land harder; the poems sound like someone thinking out loud and arriving somewhere she didn't plan
Consider the movement of her poem sometimes called an apology to everything: she asks the forgiveness of coincidence for mistaking it for necessity, and of necessity in case she has it backward; she begs happiness not to mind that she claims it as her own; she apologizes to the dead for how dimly she keeps them; she asks pardon of the wars far away for bringing flowers into her house. The apologies are absurd — you cannot apologize to a concept — and yet by the end you understand that this is exactly what conscience feels like from the inside.
Notice the structure: she chooses an impossible form of address and takes it completely seriously, and the impossibility becomes the truth.
This Week's Prompt: Apologies to the Unapologizable
Today, I invite you to try Szymborska's strangest and most freeing move — the sincere apology offered to something that cannot possibly receive it.
Write a poem made of apologies directed at things that cannot accept them: an abstraction, a season, a road you didn't take, the dead, an animal, a year of your life, a version of yourself you abandoned. Keep a perfectly straight face. Let the wit carry the grief.
Getting Started
- Make a list of the unapologizable. Not people — or at least, not only people. Try: time, the ocean, a house you sold, the moon, your knees, the letter you never answered, September, the person you were at nineteen.
- Apologize for something small and true. Szymborska's genius is specificity. Don't apologize to the ocean for humanity's sins; apologize to the ocean for only visiting when you needed something. The smaller the crime, the more the poem opens.
- Contradict yourself on purpose. Somewhere, apologize for something and then immediately apologize for the apology, or beg pardon of two things that want opposite outcomes. She did this constantly, and it's where the humor lives — and the honesty.
- Change scale at least once. Zoom out to something enormous — geologic time, the number of dead, the size of the sky — and then come straight back to the coffee cup in your hand. The whiplash is the point.
- Keep the tone level. No exclamation points. No pleading. Deliver the most outrageous apology in the same calm voice you'd use to explain you'll be late. The flatness is what makes it funny, and the funniness is what lets the sorrow through.
- End without absolution. Don't let anything forgive you. Szymborska never resolves these poems — she just stops, and leaves you holding the whole strange, guilty, grateful business of being a person.
My challenges and prompts are not interactive. You don't have to come back to link up. No comments are required, just your creativity!
A Few Lines to Carry With You
The best Szymborska poems feel like being seated next to the most interesting woman at the party — the one who says something so funny you laugh out loud and then, walking to your car an hour later, realize what she actually told you.
If your draft turns heavy and earnest, that's not failure, but try one pass where you refuse to be solemn about it. Wit isn't the opposite of depth. Sometimes it's the only door narrow enough to get the truth through.
The road you didn't take doesn't know it's owed anything. The month of August doesn't know it's been forgiven. That recognition is yours to bring.
Learn More About Wisława Szymborska
You can read a detailed biography at the Poetry Foundation website, and her 1996 Nobel lecture, The Poet and the World, is freely available on the Nobel Prize website — it's short, funny, and worth reading twice.
Map: Collected and Last Poems, translated by Stanisław Barańczak and Clare Cavanagh, gathers her life's work in one volume.
View with a Grain of Sand is the slimmer, more approachable starting point, and Nonrequired Reading collects her wonderfully odd book review columns.
My challenges and prompts are not interactive. You don't have to come back to link up. No comments are required, just your creativity!
Here's my own attempt at writing in Wisława Szymborska's style:
Small Apologies, End of Summer
Forgive me, August, for wishing you gone while sitting inside your best evening. Forgive me, October, for being wished for. You will disappoint me and I have already decided to blame the weather.
Forgive me, house I sold in 2009, for driving past you twice last spring and not once in the fourteen years before that. You have new shutters. They suit you. I take back nothing I said about the kitchen.
Forgive me, the four hundred million years it took to arrange this particular arrangement of oxygen, that I used a portion of it this morning being irritated about a parking space.
Forgive me, girl of nineteen, for how I describe you at parties: as a cautionary tale, as a phase, as someone I have thankfully outgrown. You would not recognize my hands. You would recognize, instantly, my worst habits.
Forgive me, everyone still alive, for how much of my attention goes to the ones who are not. And forgive me, the ones who are not, for how little.
I am sorry. I am mostly sorry. The tea is getting cold, which is its own small and unforgivable emergency, and I intend to drink it anyway.