Love At First Sight

I was surfing today when I suddenly found something really interesting. It's one of my favourite poems by a Polish poet, Wislawa Szymborska. The title is "Love At First Sight". It was originally written in Polish but has been translated into various languages by various people. But this translation I feel is the best. I first heard this poem while watching a Chinese movie "Turn Left, Turn Right". The real reason I watched that movie was of course Takeshi Kaneshiro, but I found this poem really captivating. I think it captures the essence of what is love at first sight, a feeling which baffles many of us, simply because we fail to understand the nature of it. It doesn't explain love at first sight in complicated iambic pentameters, or metaphysical Freudian imagery (which reminds you of Salvador Dali's paintings). It explains the feeling with normal, down-to-earth, day-to-day experiences and this I think is what makes the poem so realistically surreal.

Both are convinced

that a sudden surge of emotion bound them together.

Beautiful is such a certainty,

but uncertainty is more beautiful.

Because they didn't know each other earlier, they suppose that

nothing was happening between them.What of the streets, stairways and corridors

where they could have passed each other long ago?

I'd like to ask them

whether they remember-- perhaps in a revolving door

ever being face to face?

an "excuse me" in a crowd

or a voice "wrong number" in the receiver.

But I know their answer:

no, they don't remember.

They'd be greatly astonished

to learn that for a long time

chance had been playing with them.

Not yet wholly ready

to transform into fate for them

it approached them, then backed off,

stood in their way

and, suppressing a giggle,

jumped to the side.

There were signs, signals:

but what of it if they were illegible.

Perhaps three years ago,

or last Tuesday

did a certain leaflet fly

from shoulder to shoulder?

There was something lost and picked up.

Who knows but what it was a ball

in the bushes of childhood.

There were doorknobs and bells

on which earlier

touch piled on touch.

Bags beside each other in the luggage room.

Perhaps they had the same dream on a certain night,

suddenly erased after waking.

Every beginning

is but a continuation,

and the book of events

is never more than half open.