[Kätzchen]

A Beautiful Stranger

At a mirror, naked, pleasing to herself
You really were pretty; let that moment last.
The rose-brown shield of your breasts,
A belly with a black tuft just recently grown.
And they would dress you immediately in languishing
Blouses, slips, wispy robes with trains.
You wore a corset in a fashionable shade of lilac,
On your thighs garters like the straps on armor.
They hung on you layers of ridiculous fabrics
So that you could take part in their theater
of pretended ecstasies, smutty allusions.
A slave; and such you remained in the photograph
Dimmed by emulsion and the coloring of time.
Did you rebel? Yes, it is quite possible.
To know for yourself, not to tell anybody
And from the nothingness of their words,
To protect the wisdom of your mocking body.

And I; am I now liberated
from those rituals, masks, the floodlights of the ball?
Have I escaped the law that draws me
into frozen fashions, half-dead manners?

I would like to save you, beautiful stranger.
Together we depart for eternal meadows.
You are naked again, and fifteen years old.
I take you by the hand, your promised one.
Think that nothing will happen to you
That was suppose to happen,
That you can be different,
That you are your own,
And not arrested by the exactness of fate.

Czeslaw Milosz