People

People

No people are uninteresting.
Their fate is like the chronicle of planets.

Nothing in them is not particular,
and planet is dissimilar from planet.

And if a man lived in obscurity
making his friends in that obscurity
obscurity is not uninteresting.

To each his world is private,
and in that world one excellent minute.

And in that world one tragic minute.
These are private.

In any man who dies there dies with him
his first snow and kiss and fight.
It goes with him.

There are left books and bridges
and painted canvas and machinery.
Whose fate is to survive.

But what has gone is also not nothing:
by the rule of the game something has gone.
Not people die but worlds die in them.

 -- Yevgeny Yevtushenko

This is the poem that I left on my future husband's
windshield, which I told about in the Marriage Meme.
You can tell that that was when I was in an
existentialist phase, wondering about God, which is
probably predictable in college and also because I was
dating an atheist.