"On Angels," by Czesław Miłosz

Guest writer Maya Gelsi gathers her thoughts on belief and images in poetry.

Happy National Poetry Month! Thank you for gathering! To kick off the month of celebrating poetry, I bring to you guest writer and dear friend Maya Gelsi. Originally from Montclair, NJ, Maya graduated from Syracuse University in 2022 where she studied film. A longtime lover of poetry, Maya has written poetry since she was 10-years-old, and continues to write in California. Maya’s writing is engaging and descriptive; her words reach out to you and hold you like the hand of a friend reaching out to guide you through new terrain. She is intelligent and passionate, and every ounce of her writing shows this. I cannot think of a better person to kick off poetry month and our April newsletters, so please enjoy. —Katie

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There was no textbook on the syllabus for my freshman year Global Poetry class. The only course material listed was a copy of The Ecco Anthology of International Poetry, a thick, black-bound book that I bought used online and is now filled with my pencil annotations, stuck with Post-Its, and (somewhat shamefully) dog-eared and torn at the edges. Both in and out of class, I spent time thumbing through the pages, greedily reading works by different non-English-writing poets. The Polish-American, Nobel Prize-winning Czesław Miłosz quickly emerged as a favorite. 

On a classically cold Syracuse “spring” afternoon, frost spangling the window, our class spent a session talking about angels and reading a selection of poems about them. I’m privileged to share Miłosz’s take on angels with The Gathering’s lovely readers.

Let’s get into it.

On Angels
by Czesław Miłosz (translated from Polish by the author)

All was taken away from you: white dresses,
wings, even existence.
Yet I believe you,
messengers.

There, where the world is turned inside out,
a heavy fabric embroidered with stars and beasts,
you stroll, inspecting the trustworthy seams.

Short is your stay here:
now and then at a matinal hour, if the sky is clear,
in a melody repeated by a bird,
or in the smell of apples at the close of day
when the light makes the orchards magic.

They say somebody has invented you
but to rue this does not sound convincing
for humans invented themselves as well.

The voice— no doubt it is a valid proof,
as it can belong only to radiant creatures,
weightless and winged (after all, why not?),
girdled with the lightning.

I have heard that voice many a time when asleep
and, what is strange, I understood more or less
an order or an appeal in an unearthly tongue:

day draws near
another one
do what you can.

It’s important to note, first, that this isn’t a religious poem. There’s no mention of biblical angels, or heaven, or any religious teachings. “On Angels” concerns itself with belief, beauty, and wonder— entirely separate from any religious entities or schools of thought. Miłosz names the angels as messengers but does not name any god as the sender.

Miłosz begins the poem with a negation: “All was taken away from you”. Matthew Zapruder, a living American poet, writes in his book Why Poetry (which I highly recommend): “Negation creates possibility. It allows elements into the poem that would not be there if the poet restricted herself to what was real, possible, believed.” By immediately creating an absence, a vacuum at the beginning of the poem, Miłosz makes a space in your mind into which the poem can flow. He establishes a place for the angels, to explain them, whose existence has been taken away. After the fabric metaphor, which I’ll get to in a bit, Miłosz locates the angels inside some concrete nature imagery: a clear sky, birdsong, apples. He focuses our attention on the beauty of the natural world, telling us that this is where the angels visit, here in our orchards, in the clean smell of fruit. Miłosz urges us to find wonder in the world. “On Angels” celebrates the ordinary here, encouraging us readers to experience everyday beauty and thereby find the angels. I like the little parenthetical in the fifth stanza: “(after all, why not?)” because it reminds us that, quite frankly, it’s fun to believe. Why not winged angels? Why not believe? If you do, if you pay attention to our world’s beauties, you’ll hear the voices of the angels, the messengers.

Which brings us to their message. The voice our speaker hears “many a time when asleep,” one that carries “an order or an appeal”. The final lines of this poem stop me short even though I’ve read them countless times. “Day draws near / another one / do what you can.” A sobering, grounding ending for a poem about fantastical beings, a poem that talks about light making the orchards magic (a line almost too sugary for me). It reminds me of the famous ending of Rilke’s poem “Archaic Torso of Apollo,” a piece about an ancient statue that ends abruptly with a call to action: “You must change your life.” Miłosz’s call to action is similar. It’s nonspecific, not telling the reader what to do, just to do what they can. This command has meant different things to me at different times. “Do what you can”— whatever you can spare, whatever you can manage, whatever it takes. It leaves the final decision, the responsibility, with the reader. We have the choice of whether or not to believe in the angels and, if we do, whether or not to listen. 

I’ll close with a shout-out to my favorite part of the poem: the metaphor of the world as “a heavy fabric embroidered with stars and beasts.” This image permanently leans on my brain, coming up in my thoughts every so often. I love it, and I love the angels at the seams, checking for loose threads or holes. It’s fun to link this placement of the angels (at the seams) with the placement of them in natural beauty later in the poem. This association suggests that the seams and, for example, the orchard, are the same place. Small beauties hold the world together, monitored and kept up by angels. 

I hope you readers find the always-present beauty in the everyday, and that you listen to it. For me, it’s the newly green California hills, no longer drought-brown thanks to unusual, much-needed rainfall. And the taste of the chamomile tea I drink at night. And the smell of the eucalyptus tree on the block where I park my car. What are yours?

Thank you for having me, readers.

If you enjoyed Czesław Miłosz’s writing… you can read more of his work here.

If you want more ways to celebrate National Poetry Month… check out US Poet Laureate Ada Limón’s curated Poem-of-the-Day throughout the month here.

If you want to try writing poetry, Maya suggests… go outside and pick something to describe in detail. A leaf, a  rock, a stream. Give it your full attention. Then see if you can put it in a poem.