«If you call poetry...», Jaroslav Seifert

If you call poetry a song
- and people often do -
then I've sung all my life.
And I marched with those who had nothing,
who lived from hand to mouth.
I was one of them.

I sang of their sufferings,
their faith, their hopes,
and I lived with them through whatever
they had to live through. Through their anguish,
weakness and fear and courage
and poverty's grief.
And their blood, whenever it flowed,
spattered me.

Always it flowed in plenty,
in this land of sweet rivers, grass and butterflies
and passionate women.
Of women, too, I sang.
Blinded by love
I staggered through my life,
tripping over dropped blossoms
or a cathedral step.