May 16, 2026

Try to praise the mutilated world.

Zagajewski wrote this poem in the summer of 2001, and it appeared in *The New Yorker* in the issue that followed September 11th, becoming one of the most widely read poems of that moment. He had lived through Communist Poland, exile, and the displacement that comes from belonging fully to no single place or country. The poem insists that attention itself is a form of freedom — that to praise what remains, even what is broken, is an act of sovereign will that no circumstance can fully take away. In a world that pressures us toward numbness or despair, choosing to notice and bless is one of the purest expressions of autonomy we have.