View with a Grain of Sand: Selected Poems

Wislawa Szymborska

I particularly liked the first poem, Notes from a Non-existent Himalayan Expedition , where she addresses the Yeti,

Yeti, down there we've got Wednesday,
bread and alphabets.
Two times two is four.
Roses are red there,
and violets are blue.

Yeti, crime is not all
we're up to down there.
Yeti, not every sentence there
means death.

We've inherited hope --
the gift of forgetting.
You'll see how we give
birth among the ruins.

It is only later that I learnt that the Yeti in this poem was actually meant to be Stalin, to whom she is talking about life outside communism. Szymborska also writes about everyday things, presenting a whimsical perspective on everyday things. In The Onion, she writes:

The onion, now that's something else.
Its innards don't exist.
Nothing but pure onionhood
fills this devout onionist.
Oniony on the inside,
onionesque it appears.
It follows its own daimonion
without our human tears.

Our skin is just a coverup
for the land where none dare go,
an internal inferno,
the anathema of anatomy.
In an onion there's only onion
from its top to its toe,
onionymous monomania,
unanimous omninudity.

This is a collection of poems worth reading. This site has a exhaustive collection of her poems.