I Don’t Know

Wislawa Szymborska’s line — “Poets, if they’re genuine, must always keep repeating, ‘I don’t know’” — echoes the humility at the heart of both poetry and wisdom. She wasn’t celebrating ignorance. She was holding open the door to curiosity, to honesty, to reverence for life’s deep mysteries.

Born in Bnin, Poland, in 1923, Szymborska lived through Nazi occupation, Soviet censorship, and the reconstruction of a nation that carried wounds no words could fully mend. But she tried anyway. Not with grand declarations, but with quiet awe. She wrote poems about onions, cats, clouds, and beetles — not to make small things big, but to show how everything ordinary, under the right light, becomes astonishing.

During the German occupation, universities in Poland were banned. Still, Szymborska traveled each day by train to attend underground classes. Students met in secret, risking arrest for the simple act of learning. Picture her there: a young woman clutching banned books, reading by candlelight in cold basements. Her education was never handed to her — it was earned, line by line, under threat.

After the war, she published her first poem in 1945. In those early years, she supported the Communist Party. Her early writing echoed its ideals. But as time passed, her conscience stirred. She later called those poems mistakes, and distanced herself from state rhetoric. The change wasn’t…