The Trees

The Polish poet Czeslaw Milosz' work The Separate Notebooks, begun in the winter of 1955 and completed in the spring of 1956, constitutes a meditative treatise on poetry, which can be said to be fully expressive of the powers of post-war era poetry.

In the occult poem The Wormwood Star the narrator discovers that the house of his birth has been destroyed by war:

When Thomas brought news that the
       house I was born in no longer exists,

Neither the lane nor the park sloping to
       the river, nothing,                   

I had a dream of return. Multicolored.
       Joyous. I was able to fly.

And the trees were even higher than in
       childhood, because they had been
        growing during all the years since they had been cut down. 

(Milosz  373)

In The Trees, Max Richter's elegy to Milosz, Kafka and other Eastern-European masters, a reading of The Wormwood Star is undertaken by Tilda Swinton.