I Wish I'd Written This

The Small Box

By Vasko Popa (1922 – 1991)

The small box gets its first teeth

And its small length
Its small width and small emptiness
And all that it has got

The small box is growing bigger
And now the cupboard is in it
That it was in before

And it grows bigger and bigger and bigger
And now has in it the room
And the house and the town and the land
And the world it was in before

The small box remembers its childhood
And by overgreat longing
It becomes a box again

Now in the small box
Is the whole world quite tiny
You can easily put it in a pocket
Easily steal it easily lose it

Take care of the small box

Vasko (aka Vasco) Popa was born in a part of Yugoslavia now known as Serbia. He studied Philosophy at the Universities of Belgrade, Bucharest and Vienna. During World War II he fought as a partisan, and was imprisoned in a German concentration camp. He went on to become an active and prominent figure in the literary life of his country.

You can find more of his poems here, and his books here. Wikipedia tells us: 'He created a unique poetic language, mostly elliptical, that combines a modern form, often expressed through colloquial speech and common idioms and phrases, with old, oral folk traditions of Serbia – epic and lyric poems, stories, myths, riddles, etc.'

Why would I like to have written this poem in particular? No rational reason — just that I fell in love with it when I first encountered it, decades ago, and have never fallen out of love. It appeals to that something in me that likes certain kinds of jokes or songs and not others, inexplicably. I am not alone; I believe it was his most popular piece. Something about it captures the imagination and I, for one, want to not merely take care of but cherish the small box.

However, if the poem is too mysterious for you, I can tell you that it has been analysed by his readers and students as being a metaphor for memories and the gradual growing up from childhood.

I have just discovered that he wrote a series of small box poems, and here they are. But I think none of them has the charm of the first, though the last one comes somewhere near.

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