Adam Mickiewicz 

                           Invocation

O Lithuania, my fatherland,
Thou art like health; what praise thou shouldst command
Only the man finds who has lost thee quite.
Today I see, and limn, thy beauty bright
In all its splendor, for I yearn for thee.

O holy Virgin, who dost oversee
Bright Czenstochowa and in Wilno shinest
Above the Ostra Gate! thou who inclinest
To shelter Nowogrodek with its folk
In faithfulness. When I, in youth, bespoke
Thy help, by miracle thou didst restore
My failing health; when my sad mother bore
Me to thy seat, my deathlike eyes I raised;
Walked to the threshold of thy shrine amazed;
And thanked God for the health brought back to me- 
So by a miracle thou wilt decree
That we regain our country. Meanwhile bear
To those treed hills my spirit of despair,
To those green meadows, stretching far and wide
By the blue Niemen; to those grain fields pied
With hues of various harvests, gold with wheat,
Silvered with rye; where mustard-blossoms meet
With buckwheat white as snow; where clover glows
As with a girl's blush; and green turf-strip bows
Engirdle all the garth with ribbons rare,
As quiet pear-trees slumber here and there.

  The beginning of ‘Pan Tadeusz’, a national epic
  ( translated by Watson Kirkconnel)

 Adam Mickiewicz (1798-1855) was the most exceptional of Poland's Romantics - a poet, columnist, political activist, and visionary.

Mickiewicz left behind a literary output both vast and varied. It encompasses poetry, epic poems, dramas, and essays, and includes many fragments and unfinished works. Mickiewcz's philosophical and social views also proved potent. His singular mixture of religion, Romantic nationalism, and social radicalism caused many political groups to cite him as an inspiration. His Slavic ‘messianism’ proved significant to the shaping of national identities in the countries of central and Eastern Europe that did not enjoy independent statehood

  Czesław Miłosz

            Song on the End of the World

On the day the world ends
A bee circles a clover,
A Fisherman mends a glimmering net.
Happy porpoises jump in the sea,
By the rainspout young sparrows are playing And the snake is gold-skinned as it it should always be.
On the day the world ends
Women walk through fields under their umbrellas
A drunkard grows sleepy at the edge of a lawn,
Vegetable peddlers shout in the street
And a yellow-sailed boat comes nearer the island,
The voice of a violin lasts in the air
And leads into a starry night.
And those who expected lightning and thunder
Are disappointed.
And those who expected signs and archangels' trumps
Do not believe it is happening now.
As long as the sun and the moon are above,
As long as the bumblebee visits a rose
As long as rosy infants are born
No one believes it is happening now.
Only a white-haired old man, who would be a prophet,
Yet is not a prophet, for he's much too busy,
Repeats while he binds his tomatoes:
No other end of the world there will be,
No other end of the world there will be.

    (translated by Anthony Miłosz)

Czesław Miłosz (1911 – 2004) was a poet and essayist.

He won the Nobel Prize in Literature in 1980. His poetry is rich in visual-symbolic metaphor. The idyllic and the apocalyptic go hand-in-hand. The verse sometimes suggests naked philosophical discourse of religious epiphany. Miłosz transcends genre; as a poet and translator, he moves easily from contemporary American poets to the Bible (portions of which he translated anew into Polish)