The Small Box, by Vasko Popa

    Poems fail to touch us when we try to understand them literally. Their affect may come only by turning off our attention. If you try to find meaning in The Small Box, you may finally decide it is about the human heart or love or any number of things, but you will miss its  reason for being -- its loveliness.

The Small Box

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 small 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

    (Quoted from page ix of Poetry Is, by Ted Hughes. Doubleday, 1967.)
    For a brief biography of Vasko Popa, click here. For images of or relating to Vasko Popa, click here.