Wisława Szymborska - Children of Our Age lyrics

We are children of our age, it's a political age. All day long, all through the night, all affairs—yours, ours, theirs— are political affairs. Whether you like it or not, your genes have a political past, your skin, a political cast, your eyes, a political slant. Whatever you say reverberates, whatever you don't say speaks for itself. So either way you're talking politics. Even when you take to the woods, you're taking political steps on political grounds. Apolitical poems are also political, and above us shines a moon no longer purely lunar. To be or not to be, that is the question. and though it troubles the digestion it's a question, as always, of politics. To acquire a political meaning you don't even have to be human. Raw material will do, or protein feed, or crude oil, or a conference table whose shape was quarreled over for months: Should we arbitrate life and d**h at a round table or a square one. Meanwhile, people perished, animals died, houses burned, and the fields ran wild just as in times immemorial and less political.