May 30, 2026

Try to praise the mutilated world.

Zagajewski wrote this poem in the summer of 2001, and it ran in The New Yorker on September 24th of that year, two weeks after the attacks on the World Trade Center. The editors had selected it before September 11th, but the timing made it feel like a direct response to grief and wreckage. The poem insists that beauty does not require perfect conditions — that strawberries, music, and gray feathers left on a park bench are worth noticing even when the world is broken. That insistence is why the poem still travels so far: it does not ask you to ignore what is terrible, only to look for what remains good alongside it.