My hair is happy
and my skin is happy.
My skin quivers with happiness.
I breathe happiness instead of air,
slowly and deeply,
as a man who avoided a mortal danger.
Tears roll down my face,
I do not know it.
I forget I still have a face.
My skin is singing,
I shiver.
I feel time's duration
as it felt in the hour of death.
As if my sense of time alone were grasping the world,
as if existence were time only.
Immersed in terrifying
magnificence
I feel every second of happiness, as it arrives,
fills up, bursts into flower
according to its own natural way,
unhurried as a fruit,
astounding as a deity.
Now
I begin to scream.
I am screaming. I leave my body.
I do not now whether I am human anymore,
how could anyone know that, screaming with happiness.
Yet one dies from such screaming,
thus I am dying from happiness.
On my face there are probably no more tears,
my skin probably does not sing by now.
I don't know whether I still have a skin,
from me to my skin
is too far to know.
Soon I will go.
I do not shiver any longer,
I do not breathe any longer.
I don't know whether I still have
something to breathe with.
I feel time's duration,
how perfectly I feel time's duration.
I sink
I sink into time.
Anna Swir (Swirszcynska)
1909-1984
