It is said — here, now — that one of the great markers of spiritual kinship is a love for the same poetry. For if two souls are equally moved by the same pulsating constellation of metaphor and meaning, they are not only bound by a common language and a shared sensibility but also exist in the same dimension of truth and possibility. Poetry, after all, is the ultimate meeting place.

I was recently delighted to bond with my friend and soul-sister Amanda Palmer — not only a magnificent musician but also a writer of great wisdom — over our shared love for the great Polish poet and translator Wisława Szymborska (July 2, 1923–February 1, 2012). In 1996, Szymborska was awarded the Nobel Prize in Literature “for poetry that with ironic precision allows the historical and biological context to come to light in fragments of human reality.” Upon announcing the prize, the Nobel commission noted her reputation as “the Mozart of poetry” but aptly added that there is also “something of the fury of Beethoven in her creative work.”

To me, she is nothing short of Bach, that great cosmologist of the human spirit.

I asked Amanda, and she kindly agreed, to lend her beautiful voice to my favorite Szymborska poem: “Possibilities,” found in the altogether breathtaking volume Poems New and Collected (public library), translated by Stanislaw Baranczak and Clare Cavanagh.

Please enjoy:

POSSIBILITIES I prefer movies. I prefer cats. I prefer the oaks along the Warta. I prefer Dickens to Dostoyevsky. I prefer myself liking people to myself loving mankind. I prefer keeping a needle and thread on hand, just in case. I prefer the color green. I prefer not to maintain that reason is to blame for everything. I prefer exceptions. I prefer to leave early. I prefer talking to doctors about something else. I prefer the old fine-lined illustrations. I prefer the absurdity of writing poems to the absurdity of not writing poems. I prefer, where love’s concerned, nonspecific anniversaries that can be celebrated every day. I prefer moralists who promise me nothing. I prefer cunning kindness to the over-trustful kind. I prefer the earth in civvies. I prefer conquered to conquering countries. I prefer having some reservations. I prefer the hell of chaos to the hell of order. I prefer Grimms’ fairy tales to the newspapers’ front pages. I prefer leaves without flowers to flowers without leaves. I prefer dogs with uncropped tails. I prefer light eyes, since mine are dark. I prefer desk drawers. I prefer many things that I haven’t mentioned here to many things I’ve also left unsaid. I prefer zeroes on the loose to those lined up behind a cipher. I prefer the time of insects to the time of stars. I prefer to knock on wood. I prefer not to ask how much longer and when. I prefer keeping in mind even the possibility that existence has its own reason for being.

Complement with my reading of Mark Strand’s equally, if very differently, bewitching poem “Dreams” and Mary Oliver’s reading of her deeply enlivening “Wild Geese.”

Amanda’s music, like Brain Pickings, is free and supported by donations — a heartening celebration of the creative possibilities that open up when we actively stand behind the things we prefer; when we choose the absurdity of supporting artists over the absurdity of not supporting artists.