Born on September 23, 1901, Jaroslav Seifert lived through nearly the entire turbulent history of twentieth-century Czechoslovakia while remaining, above all else, a lyric poet. Revolutions changed governments around him, armies occupied his country, political movements he had once supported hardened into systems he later opposed, and censorship repeatedly affected his ability to publish. Yet Seifert kept returning to subjects far older and more intimate than politics: love, beauty, childhood, memory, Prague, mothers, women, flowers, music, mortality, and the stubborn human desire to find joy even when history seems determined to destroy it.
His career stretched from the radical artistic movements of the 1920s to the dissident culture of the 1970s and 1980s. As a young man, he helped shape the Czech avant-garde and embraced revolutionary politics. Later, he broke with the Communist Party, publicly defended persecuted writers, opposed repression, and became one of the early signatories of Charter 77. Meanwhile, his poetry steadily changed, moving from youthful revolutionary energy through playful Poetism, intimate lyricism, wartime patriotism, memory, free verse, and increasingly reflective meditations on aging and death.
In 1984, Seifert received the Nobel Prize in Literature, becoming the first Czech writer to receive the literature prize. By then, his health was failing and he could not travel to Stockholm to accept it personally. Yet the award recognized something readers in his homeland had understood for decades: Seifert had become not simply an important poet but one of the literary voices through which generations of Czech readers understood memory, beauty, identity, and survival.
🏙️ A Childhood in Žižkov
Jaroslav Seifert was born in Žižkov, then a largely working-class district on the edge of Prague. The neighborhood was filled with factory workers, craftsmen, small shops, crowded streets, modest apartments, taverns, and the daily life of people for whom money was rarely abundant. His upbringing placed him far from aristocratic or academic privilege and gave him a lasting affection for ordinary people and ordinary places.
Žižkov also gave Seifert something that remained important in his poetry: humor. He could be sentimental, romantic, nostalgic, and deeply serious, but he rarely allowed solemnity to harden completely around him. Even when he became one of his country’s most honored cultural figures, his writing retained a lightness that seemed connected to the lively neighborhood where he grew up.
Prague itself would become one of the great subjects of his poetry. He loved its streets, bridges, towers, churches, gardens, riverbanks, cafés, and old neighborhoods, but he did not treat the city merely as architecture. Prague in Seifert is inhabited. It contains childhood, romance, political history, friends who have disappeared, women once loved, and memories that become inseparable from particular streets. The city changes, but memory keeps another version of it alive.
📚 Leaving School for Literature
Seifert did not follow the conventional path of a university-trained literary intellectual. He became involved in journalism, publishing, politics, and poetry while still young, entering Prague’s rapidly changing cultural world during the years following the First World War and the establishment of an independent Czechoslovakia.
The new country created an atmosphere of extraordinary possibility. Political independence coincided with experiments in art, theater, architecture, typography, photography, literature, and design. Young artists wanted forms suited to a modern age rather than merely repeating the aesthetic traditions of the previous century.
Seifert belonged fully to that generation. He wrote journalism, edited publications, joined literary circles, and began publishing poetry that reflected both the social inequalities he had seen growing up and the revolutionary hopes surrounding him. Literature, politics, and everyday life all seemed connected, and for a young poet the future appeared open to reinvention.
🔴 Revolutionary Beginnings
As a young man, Seifert became involved with the Communist movement and joined the Communist Party of Czechoslovakia when it was founded in 1921. For many young European intellectuals after the First World War, communism appeared to offer an answer to poverty, inequality, war, and the failures of older political systems. Seifert’s working-class background made those promises especially immediate.
His earliest poetry reflected this atmosphere. Město v slzách, or City in Tears, appeared in 1921 and belonged to the movement often described as Czech proletarian poetry. The poems viewed poverty and suffering through a revolutionary lens, but even in this early work Seifert’s lyric instincts were visible. He was not naturally drawn toward abstract ideological language. People interested him more than doctrine.
That distinction would eventually matter enormously. Political systems demand loyalty to ideas, while poetry keeps returning to individuals. Over time, Seifert increasingly chose the latter, and the tension between political commitment and personal conscience became one of the defining threads of his life.
🎨 Devětsil
Seifert became closely associated with Devětsil, the influential Czech avant-garde group formed in Prague in 1920. Devětsil brought together poets, artists, architects, designers, critics, theater makers, and other young cultural figures who wanted to invent an art appropriate to modern life. Among the names associated with the movement were Karel Teige, Vítězslav Nezval, Adolf Hoffmeister, and other figures who would become central to Czech modernism.
The members were fascinated by the modern city, film, advertising, circuses, travel, photography, jazz, popular entertainment, machines, typography, and the rapid flow of images through contemporary culture. The world itself seemed newly assembled, and art, they believed, should respond with the same energy.
Seifert’s poetry changed dramatically within this environment. The revolutionary seriousness of his earliest work began giving way to wit, movement, pleasure, visual experimentation, and a fascination with the modern world as spectacle.
🎈 Poetism
From Devětsil emerged Poetism, one of the most distinctive Czech avant-garde movements of the 1920s. Poetism celebrated play, pleasure, imagination, travel, modern technology, popular culture, and the delight of simply being alive. After the severity of war and revolutionary politics, the movement insisted that art could also be joyful.
This suited Seifert remarkably well. His poetry became lighter, more visual, more playful, and more sensual. He wrote about travel, love, exotic places, modern communication, city life, beauty, and desire with a sense of youthful movement and curiosity.
Na vlnách TSF, often translated as On the Waves of TSF, became one of the emblematic works of his avant-garde period. Even its visual presentation reflected experiments with typography and modern design. The political poet had discovered something equally important: joy, play, and beauty could also carry cultural power.
🌍 Paris and Modern Europe
Like many Czech artists of his generation, Seifert was fascinated by Paris. The French capital represented modernity, international artistic culture, surrealism, cafés, cinema, fashion, poetry, and the possibility of living beyond provincial boundaries. Visits to France exposed Seifert directly to artistic experiments that were reshaping European literature.
Yet he never simply became a Czech imitation of French modernism. Prague remained the emotional center of his imagination. Foreign travel could stimulate him, but it also clarified what home meant.
This tension between elsewhere and home would recur throughout his poetry. He loved the possibility of travel, but memory repeatedly pulled him back toward familiar streets, familiar landscapes, and the Czech language itself. Modernism opened the world to him, but Prague remained the place from which he measured it.
❤️ Love as a Lifelong Subject
Politics changed dramatically across Seifert’s lifetime, but love remained one of his most persistent subjects. Women, beauty, desire, memory, romance, and sensuality appear again and again throughout his poetry. Even in old age, when illness and mortality had become increasingly present, Seifert could return to the memory of a woman’s face, a gesture, a dress, a flower, or a moment of desire.
This does not make his poetry superficial. Quite the opposite. Love offered him a way of resisting the tendency of political history to reduce human beings to categories. Governments see citizens, armies see populations, and ideologies see classes, but the lyric poet sees a face and remembers a voice.
That attention to the individual became one of Seifert’s deepest strengths. His poems repeatedly return the human scale to a century dominated by systems that preferred abstractions.
📰 The Journalist
Seifert spent much of his working life as a journalist and editor. He contributed to and edited newspapers and literary publications, moving between poetry and the practical world of deadlines, current events, editorial decisions, and public debate.
Journalism kept him close to the political realities around him, but it also gave him an ear for accessible language. Seifert’s poetry rarely depends upon deliberate obscurity. Even when his imagery becomes layered or his late poems grow philosophically reflective, his language often retains a conversational directness.
He wanted poetry to be read rather than merely admired from a distance. This accessibility would become one reason Czech readers developed such affection for him. He could be artistically sophisticated without making sophistication feel like a locked door.
⚖️ Breaking With the Communist Party
The revolutionary enthusiasm of Seifert’s youth did not survive unchanged. By the late 1920s, the Communist Party of Czechoslovakia was becoming increasingly aligned with a stricter Bolshevik direction under new leadership, and Seifert and several other writers objected publicly to the change.
In 1929, he was expelled from the party. The break became one of the defining political decisions of his life. Seifert had once believed communism could create a more just society, but he was unwilling to subordinate literature and individual judgment completely to party discipline.
His departure did not turn him into a poet without social concerns. It made him increasingly suspicious of ideology that demanded obedience. That skepticism would become especially important after the Communist takeover of Czechoslovakia following the Second World War.
🌸 Moving Toward Lyricism
During the 1930s, Seifert moved farther from revolutionary poetry and increasingly toward personal lyricism. His work became more intimate as love, memory, Prague, childhood, beauty, women, family, and the fleeting quality of happiness became increasingly central.
Collections from this period reveal a poet discovering that apparently modest subjects could contain extraordinary emotional depth. He no longer needed a grand political subject to create significance. A mother’s gesture, a remembered street, or an encounter with beauty could carry its own kind of history.
This transition was not a retreat from the world. History would soon become impossible to escape. But when crisis arrived, Seifert would approach it as a lyric poet rather than as a political propagandist.
🇨🇿 The Munich Crisis and Occupation
The late 1930s brought catastrophe to Czechoslovakia. The Munich Agreement of 1938 forced the country to surrender the Sudetenland to Nazi Germany, and German occupation followed in 1939.
For Czech writers, the survival of language and culture suddenly acquired enormous significance. Seifert responded through poetry that expressed attachment to his country without turning patriotism into empty rhetoric. Prague, Czech history, landscape, cultural figures, and national memory took on new emotional weight.
Poetry could not stop an occupying army, but it could preserve a sense of identity. Seifert later reflected upon the special importance poetry had held in Czech history during periods when political independence and cultural survival were threatened. That belief came partly from experience.
🕯️ Poetry Under Occupation
During the German occupation, literature had to operate beneath censorship and intimidation. Direct political expression could be dangerous, so poets often relied upon history, landscape, national symbols, and cultural memory to express meanings readers understood without those meanings needing to be stated openly.
Seifert’s accessible lyric voice became particularly valuable under these conditions. A poem about Prague could mean more than Prague, while a historical figure could represent continuity and a familiar landscape could become a declaration that a culture still existed.
This relationship between poetry and national survival remained important to Seifert long after the war ended. For him, poetry was not simply decoration around history. Sometimes it was one of the ways people endured it.
👩 Maminka
Among Seifert’s most beloved works is Maminka, or Mother, a collection centered on memories of his mother, father, childhood, home, and the intimate world from which adulthood gradually separates us.
The poems are among the clearest examples of Seifert’s ability to transform personal memory into something widely recognizable. A mother’s gestures, objects in a room, family routines, and small childhood impressions become emotionally significant because they belong to a world that can never be recovered completely.
History tells us when governments changed, while memory tells us how a room smelled, how a voice sounded, or how a parent moved through the house. Both are true, but only one belongs entirely to the individual. Seifert understood that poetry could preserve those details long after ordinary life had erased them.
🌹 Memory as a Form of Survival
Memory became increasingly important as Seifert grew older. The older poet inhabited several versions of Prague at once. There was the city around him, the city destroyed or altered by history, and the Prague preserved in memory.
Friends who had died could return in a poem, a vanished neighborhood could briefly reappear, and a woman encountered decades earlier could become young again. This is one of lyric poetry’s strange powers. It cannot reverse time, but it can make the lost moment present for a few lines.
Seifert’s later poetry repeatedly uses that possibility without pretending memory is complete or reliable. The past returns in fragments, and perhaps that is precisely why it feels true.
🏛️ After the Communist Takeover
The Communist takeover of Czechoslovakia in 1948 created a new and increasingly restrictive cultural environment. The party Seifert had left in 1929 now controlled the state, and writers faced political pressures, censorship, expectations of ideological conformity, and the growing dominance of officially approved cultural doctrines.
Seifert’s relationship with the authorities became complicated. He was too respected to disappear easily, but he was also too independent to become a reliable literary spokesman for the regime.
This position allowed him some room to publish at certain periods while repeatedly exposing him to official suspicion. His reputation protected him, but it did not silence him.
🗣️ Speaking for Silenced Writers
In 1956, during a congress of Czechoslovak writers, Seifert publicly criticized the persecution and silencing of writers. The intervention was courageous because the Stalinist period had left writers imprisoned, censored, banned, or frightened into silence, and speaking openly about such conditions carried real consequences.
Seifert’s standing gave his words particular weight. He was no longer an inexperienced radical but one of the country’s best-known poets.
His argument was rooted in a principle that had gradually become central to his life: a writer cannot surrender truth merely because authority demands silence. The young revolutionary had become a defender of literary independence.
🎨 Poetry and Czech Art
Seifert frequently responded to visual art and to the work of Czech artists. Collections inspired by figures such as Mikoláš Aleš and Josef Lada reveal how deeply he felt the relationship between poetry and visual memory.
These artists helped define popular images of Czech landscapes, villages, childhood, folklore, and everyday life, and Seifert responded with words. The collaboration across art forms suited him because his own poetry is often highly visual.
He notices color, movement, faces, clothing, streets, flowers, buildings, paintings, and objects with a painter’s attention. An image can arrive before an explanation, allowing the reader to see first and interpret afterward.
🎵 The Music of Seifert’s Poetry
Musicality is one of the qualities most often associated with Seifert. His earlier poems frequently use rhyme and memorable rhythms, making them accessible to readers and listeners alike. Even as his later work moved increasingly toward free verse, he retained an ear for cadence and conversational music.
This helps explain why translation can be difficult. The meaning of a poem can cross languages, but its music may not cross so easily.
Seifert’s reputation outside the Czech-speaking world therefore depends heavily upon translators attempting to preserve not merely information but tone, rhythm, intimacy, wit, and emotional lightness. The challenge is enormous because his apparent simplicity can be deceptive. A line that sounds effortless may depend upon precisely the qualities hardest to reproduce.
🌼 Beauty During Difficult Times
Seifert’s poetry repeatedly insists upon beauty without pretending suffering does not exist. A flower does not cancel a war, love does not erase political repression, and a beautiful city can still contain prisons. A happy childhood memory can coexist with adult grief.
Seifert allows these realities to stand beside one another. Beauty matters precisely because the world can be cruel, and the lyric poem temporarily protects something fragile from the machinery surrounding it.
That may be one reason readers continued turning to him during difficult periods of Czech history. His optimism was not ignorance. It was resistance to despair.
🌱 The Prague Spring
The political thaw of the 1960s allowed Czech cultural life greater freedom, and Seifert again occupied a prominent public position. In 1967, he was named a National Artist of Czechoslovakia. Two years later, during the aftermath of the Prague Spring and the Warsaw Pact invasion of August 1968, he became chairman of the Czechoslovak Writers’ Union.
These years placed writers at the center of arguments about censorship, political reform, and freedom of expression. Seifert supported greater cultural freedom and opposed the renewed restrictions imposed during the period that became known as normalization.
Once again, the poet found himself confronting authority, and once again publication became difficult.
🚫 Censorship and the 1970s
During the 1970s, Seifert’s position within official literary culture deteriorated sharply. His writings could be delayed, restricted, or kept from normal publication, and some works circulated in samizdat or appeared abroad before becoming readily available at home.
By then, Seifert was an elderly and increasingly ill writer, but the state could limit publication more easily than it could erase his reputation. Readers already knew him, other writers respected him, and his literary authority extended beyond what cultural officials could comfortably control.
This created an unusual situation in which one of the country’s most beloved poets could simultaneously occupy a marginalized position within the official publishing system.
📝 Charter 77
In 1977, Seifert became one of the early signatories of Charter 77, the civic initiative calling upon the Czechoslovak government to honor human rights commitments it had formally accepted.
The decision placed him alongside writers, intellectuals, musicians, philosophers, and other citizens willing to challenge the government’s record publicly. For Seifert, signing the document was consistent with a journey that had begun decades earlier.
He had once joined a revolutionary movement because he believed it could improve human lives. He later rejected that movement when party obedience began conflicting with intellectual independence. By old age, he had become a public symbol of the writer’s right to speak without political permission.
Yet his poetry remained poetry. He did not transform his books into political manifestos.
🔔 The Plague Column
One of Seifert’s important later works is Morový sloup, usually translated as The Plague Column. The title evokes the Baroque plague columns found in Central European cities, monuments created after epidemics as expressions of mourning, gratitude, survival, and religious devotion.
For Seifert, the image becomes a way of approaching historical suffering, memory, mortality, love, and cultural survival. His later poetry often moves freely between private memory and collective history.
A personal recollection can suddenly open toward a larger national experience, while a political catastrophe can narrow into the memory of one human face. That movement is fundamental to Seifert because history matters most when it happens to individuals.
☂️ The Umbrella from Piccadilly
Another late collection, commonly known in English as The Umbrella from Piccadilly, demonstrates the remarkable vitality of Seifert’s old age.
The poetry becomes conversational, reflective, and increasingly aware of mortality, yet sensuality and humor remain. The elderly poet still remembers women, notices beauty, loves Prague, and allows an ordinary object to open the door into memory.
This is one of the appealing qualities of Seifert’s late work. Old age does not erase desire. It changes its relationship with time. The beloved becomes partly memory, the city becomes partly memory, and even the self becomes something the poet looks back upon.
✍️ To Be a Poet
Seifert’s final collection, Býti básníkem, or To Be a Poet, appeared in the early 1980s. The title sounds almost like a summary of his life.
After political commitments, literary movements, occupations, governments, censorship battles, friendships, loves, awards, disappointments, and decades of writing, one identity remained: poet.
The late poems possess the clarity of someone who has little interest in posing for posterity. Seifert writes about aging and the approach of death, but not with relentless gloom. There is gratitude, memory, humor, desire, beauty, and the recognition that poetry has accompanied him almost the entire distance.
📖 All the Beauty in the World
Seifert also produced a remarkable prose memoir, Všecky krásy světa, commonly translated as All the Beauty in the World.
Rather than presenting his life as a rigid chronological autobiography, the book unfolds through memories of writers, artists, friends, places, literary movements, political events, and the cultural world of Prague.
The form feels appropriate because memory rarely proceeds neatly by date. One person recalls another, a street recalls an evening, and a poem recalls a friendship. The past opens sideways.
The memoir preserves an extraordinary literary generation while also revealing Seifert’s gift for affectionate portraiture. Many people in its pages had vanished, and writing allowed them to return.
🏙️ Prague as Muse
Few poets are as closely associated with Prague as Seifert. The city’s physical beauty made it natural poetic material, but his attachment went beyond admiration for architecture.
Prague contained his biography. Žižkov held childhood, other streets held friends, bridges carried history, cafés carried literary conversation, and old buildings carried generations of memory.
During occupation and political repression, the city could also become a symbol of threatened cultural continuity. Seifert’s Prague is therefore both real and imagined.
Readers can walk through it, but no one can walk through exactly the city he remembered. That Prague survives only in language.
🌷 Women and the Memory of Desire
Even during his final years, Seifert continued writing about women and desire with an openness that distinguished him from poets who treat old age as though sensual life simply disappears.
Memory allows youth and age to occupy the same poem. The old man remembers the young woman, but he also remembers the younger version of himself who once looked at her.
Desire therefore becomes inseparable from mortality. The remembered body remains young, while the remembering body does not. Seifert does not resolve that contradiction. He makes poetry from it.
🕰️ Aging and Mortality
As illness increasingly limited Seifert’s physical life, his poetry became freer and more reflective. The tightly patterned lyric poetry of earlier decades gave way increasingly to flexible free verse and a conversational tone capable of moving quickly between memory, observation, humor, history, and death.
The change feels less like abandoning his earlier poetry than stripping it down. What remains when the poet no longer needs ornament is a voice, a memory, an image, and a few words addressed to someone who may no longer be alive.
Seifert’s late poetry often feels intimate because it asks so little distance between speaker and reader. The older poet does not stand above experience. He speaks from within its fading light.
🏆 The Nobel Prize
In 1984, Jaroslav Seifert received the Nobel Prize in Literature. The Swedish Academy honored poetry characterized by freshness, sensuality, inventiveness, and an enduring image of human resilience.
For Czech readers, the international recognition carried special significance. Seifert had lived through censorship and political marginalization, yet the writer whom authorities had periodically attempted to restrict was now receiving the world’s most famous literary prize.
His health prevented him from traveling to Stockholm, so his daughter accepted the award on his behalf. The elderly poet remained in Prague, but the world had finally come to him.
🎤 The Nobel Lecture and the Need for Poetry
Seifert’s Nobel lecture reflected upon the unusual importance poetry had held in Czech cultural history. He connected that importance with centuries in which the Czech language and national culture had repeatedly faced political pressure.
Poetry, he argued, became one of the places where cultural identity survived and where people could seek refuge during periods of suffering. The idea helps explain his own career.
Seifert never believed lyric poetry was trivial simply because it spoke about intimate things. Love matters, memory matters, beauty matters, and language matters. During oppressive times, protecting those things can become a serious act.
He remained, as he described himself, fundamentally a lyric poet. That was not an escape from history. It was the way he entered it.
🕯️ His Final Years
Seifert spent his final years in poor health, but his literary stature continued growing. The Nobel Prize brought new international attention to a poet who had long been deeply important within Czech culture but remained less familiar to many English-speaking readers.
He died in Prague on January 10, 1986, at the age of eighty-four. His funeral became a significant public event in a country where official attitudes toward him had often been uneasy.
The poet who had spent his life writing Prague into memory had himself become part of Czech cultural memory.
📚 A Poet Across Political Eras
Seifert’s career is remarkable partly because it cannot be reduced to one historical identity. He was a proletarian poet, an avant-garde Poetist, a journalist, a former Communist, a patriotic wartime poet, a defender of persecuted writers, a lyrical poet of love and childhood, a chairman of the writers’ union, a censored author, a Charter 77 signatory, and a Nobel laureate.
All of these descriptions are true, but none is enough.
The continuity lies in poetry. Governments changed, his style changed, and his political understanding changed, but the lyric impulse remained.
🌟 Why Jaroslav Seifert Still Matters
Jaroslav Seifert matters because his work demonstrates that lyric poetry can remain intimate without becoming politically irrelevant. He rarely needed to turn a poem into a speech. Instead, he preserved human scale through one woman, one street, one childhood room, one memory of a mother, one city, one flower, or one moment of beauty inside a century overflowing with political systems eager to speak in enormous abstractions.
That scale becomes a moral choice. History counts populations, but poetry remembers people.
Seifert’s poems repeatedly return the individual to the center, which is one reason his work retains emotional force long after the immediate political conditions surrounding many of the poems have changed.
🎂 Remembering Jaroslav Seifert
Born on September 23, 1901, Jaroslav Seifert entered literature as a young revolutionary who believed poetry might help create a new world. By the time he died eighty-four years later, he had learned how often new worlds reproduce old forms of power.
Yet he never surrendered his belief in poetry. He had seen political ideals fail, watched his country occupied, experienced censorship, watched friends disappear, and grown old, but he continued writing about Prague, women, memory, his mother, beauty, and the small human experiences that large political systems repeatedly overlook.
That persistence may be the most important thing about him. Seifert did not survive the twentieth century by pretending history was harmless. He survived it as a poet by refusing to let history possess the whole of human experience.
There was always something else: a kiss, a song, a street after rain, a childhood memory, a woman’s name, a flower, or a poem. Jaroslav Seifert spent a lifetime preserving those things against disappearance, and in doing so became one of the enduring voices of Czech literature.
Lost Paradise
The Old Jewish Cemetery
is one great bouquet of grey stone
on which time has trodden.
I was drifting among the graves,
thinking of my mother.
She used to read the Bible.
The letters in two columns
welled up before her eyes
like blood from a wound.
The lamp guttered and smoked
and Mother put on her glasses.
At times she had to blow it out
and with her hairpin straighten
the glowing wick.
But when she closed her tired eyes
she dreamed of Paradise
before God had garrisoned it
with armed cherubim.
Often she fell asleep and the Book
slipped from her lap.
I was still young
when I discovered in the Old Testament
those fascinating verses about love
and eagerly searched for
the passages on incest.
Then I did not yet suspect
how much tenderness is hidden in the names
of Old Testament women.
Adah is Ornament and Orpah
is a Hind,
Naamah is the Sweetness
and Nikol is the Little Brook.
Abigail is the Fount of Delight.
But if I recall how helplessly I watched
as they dragged off the Jews,
even the crying children,
I still shudder with horror
and a chill runs down my spine.
Jemima is the Dove and Tamar
the Palm Tree.
Tirzah is Grace
and Zilpah a Dewdrop.
My God, how beautiful this is.
We were living in hell
yet no one dared to strike a weapon
from the murderers’ hands.
As if within our hearts we did not have
a spark of humanity!
The name Jecholiah means
The Lord is Mighty.
And yet their frowning God
gazed over the barbed wire
and did not move a finger —
Delilah is the Delicate, Rachel
the Ewe Lamb,
Deborah the Bee
and Esther the Bright Star.
I’d just returned from the cemetery
when the June evening, with its scents,
rested on the windows.
But from the silent distance now and then
came thunder of a future war.
There is no time without murder.
I almost forgot:
Rhoda is the Rose.
And this flower perhaps is the only thing
that’s left us on earth
from the Paradise that was.
-Jaroslav Seifert
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