Charles Simic’s poetry is known for its haunting simplicity, dark humor, and dreamlike intensity. Born in Yugoslavia and later becoming one of the most influential American poets, Simic brought a unique outsider’s vision to American literature. His poems often feel like fragments of dreams or fables, where ordinary objects—knives, forks, shoes, streets, animals—carry deep symbolic weight and unsettling mystery.
Simic’s language is plain and direct, yet what he suggests is often strange, surreal, and psychologically charged. He avoids elaborate metaphors, instead relying on sharp images and sudden turns of thought that leave a lingering emotional impact. Violence, history, and childhood memory—especially shaped by war and displacement—quietly inform his work, even when the poems appear playful or ironic on the surface.
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One of Simic’s greatest strengths is his use of silence and understatement. His poems are usually short, but they open vast emotional and philosophical spaces. He blends the influence of European surrealism with American colloquial speech, creating a voice that feels both intimate and unsettling. Humor in Simic’s poetry is often grim and absurd, revealing the cruelty and randomness of human existence.
Overall, Charles Simic’s poetry explores the mystery of being alive in a broken world. His work invites readers to look again at the familiar and discover the strange, frightening, and oddly beautiful truths hidden within everyday life.
Charon’s Cosmology
With only his dim lantern
To tell him where he is
And every time a mountain
Of fresh corpses to load up
Take them to the other side
Where there are plenty more
I’d say by now he must be confused
As to which side is which
I’d say it doesn’t matter
No one complains he’s got
Their pockets to go through
In one a crust of bread in another a sausage
Once in a long while a mirror
Or a book which he throws
Overboard into the dark river
Swift and cold and deep
Empire of Dreams
On the first page of my dreambook
It’s always evening
In an occupied country.
Hour before the curfew.
A small provincial city.
The houses all dark.
The storefronts gutted.
I am on a street corner
Where I shouldn’t be.
Alone and coatless
I have gone out to look
For a black dog who answers to my whistle.
I have a kind of Halloween mask
Which I am afraid to put on.
Fork
This strange thing must have crept
Right out of hell.
It resembles a bird’s foot
Worn around the cannibal’s neck.
As you hold it in your hand,
As you stab with it into a piece of meat,
It is possible to imagine the rest of the bird:
Its head which like your fist
Is large, bald, beakless, and blind.
The White Room
The obvious is difficult
To prove. Many prefer
The hidden. I did, too.
I listened to the trees.
They had a secret
Which they were about to
Make known to me,
And then didn’t.
Summer came. Each tree
On my street had its own
Scheherazade. My nights
Were a part of their wild
Storytelling. We were
Entering dark houses,
More and more dark houses
Hushed and abandoned.
There was someone with eyes closed
On the upper floors.
The thought of it, and the wonder,
Kept me sleepless.
The truth is bald and cold,
Said the woman
Who always wore white.
She didn’t leave her room much.
The sun pointed to one or two
Things that had survived
The long night intact,
The simplest things,
Difficult in their obviousness.
They made no noise.
It was the kind of day
People describe as “perfect.”
Gods disguising themselves
As black hairpins? A hand-mirror?
A comb with a tooth missing?
No! That wasn’t it.
Just things as they are,
Unblinking, lying mute
In that bright light,
And the trees waiting for the night.
Light Sleeper
You were a witness
To so many crimes
In your lifetime, my friend,
No wonder most nights
You can be found
Testifying in a trial
In some country
Whose language
You don’t understand.
The proceedings
Interminably slow
With more corpses
Being dragged in
Their ghastly wounds
As you recall them
In your own eyes
And news photographs.
You’ll be asked
To return tomorrow
So once more
You’ll crawl out of bed
And grope your way
Toward the silent
Crowded courtroom
They’ve set up
Just down the hall.
My Shoes
Shoes, secret face of my inner life:
Two gaping toothless mouths,
Two partly decomposed animal skins
Smelling of mice-nests.
My brother and sister who died at birth
Continuing their existence in you,
Guiding my life
Toward their incomprehensible innocence.
What use are books to me
When in you it is possible to read
The Gospel of my life on earth
And still beyond, of things to come?
I want to proclaim the religion
I have devised for your perfect humility
And the strange church I am building
With you as the altar.
Ascetic and maternal, you endure:
Kin to oxen, to Saints, to condemned men,
With your mute patience, forming
The only true likeness of myself.
Eyes Fastened With Pins
How much death works,
No one knows what a long
Day he puts in. The little
Wife always alone
Ironing death's laundry.
The beautiful daughters
Setting death's supper table.
The neighbors playing
Pinochle in the backyard
Or just sitting on the steps
Drinking beer. Death,
Meanwhile, in a strange
Part of town looking for
Someone with a bad cough,
But the address somehow wrong,
Even death can't figure it out
Among all the locked doors...
And the rain beginning to fall.
Long windy night ahead.
Death with not even a newspaper
To cover his head, not even
A dime to call the one pining away,
Undressing slowly, sleepily,
And stretching naked
On death's side of the bed.
