The door bursts into laughter: she arrives.
The flowerpots greet her with secret trembles,
and in her hair a sleepy, slim, blonde streak
chirps up: the tiny cry of a frightened sparrow.
In turn, an aging light-flex shouts with joy
and twists its awkward shapes in space towards her.
All objects spin around. I can’t keep track.
She has come home, she’d been away all day.
She holds a petal of a giant poppy
and uses that to drive away my death.
2. The First Eclogue
Quippe
ubi fas versum atque nefas: tot bella per orbem, tam multae scelerum facies...
or
here are right and wrong inverted; so many wars
overrun the world, many are the shapes of sin... Virgil, trans. H. Rushton
Fairclough
Shepherd:
I have not seen you for long, did the call of the thrushes bring
you?
Poet:
The woods resound with their clatter, spring must be on its
way! Shepherd:
It’s not spring yet, the sky only teasing, look at that puddle,
how mildly it smiles... but when it is locked up at night by the
frost
it will snarl! this is April, never be taken in by the fool –
just look, over there: the little tulips are bitten by frost.
...Why are you depressed? would you like to have a rest on a
rock?
Poet:
No, I’m not even sad, I have grown so used to this horrible
world
that sometimes it can’t even hurt me – I’m only disgusted.
Shepherd:
Likewise. I’ve heard that on the wild ridges of the Pyrenees,
among corpses stiffened in blood, the red-hot cannon hold forth
and the bears and the soldiers together flee that terrible
place...
that flocks of old people and women and children run with their
bundles
and fling themselves to the ground when murder swoops from the
skies
and the dead lie in such great heaps that no-one can clear them
away...
I trust you know Frederico. Tell me, did he escape?
Poet:
He did not escape. Two years ago now he was killed in Granada.
Shepherd:
Garcia Lorca is dead! he is dead and no-one has mentioned!
News of the war can travel so fast – and, just like that,
a poet can just disappear! But was he not mourned by Europe?
Poet:
Mourned? Why, no-one has noticed. At best the wind, perhaps
when it gropes through the pyre’s embers, remembers the odd
broken
line of a poem that may be preserved for a frustrated future.
Shepherd:
He did not escape. Indeed, where could a poet run?
Even dear Attila* has perished – he only gestured
his No to the rule of the world, and who mourns his
destruction?...
And how do you live these days? Does your poetry win a
response?
Poet:
In the roar of the guns? Among smoking ruins, abandoned hamlets?
Still, I go on with my writing and live in this war-crazed world
like that oak over there: it knows it must fall, and although it
bears
a white cross that marks it out for the woodcutter’s axe
tomorrow,
it bears forth new leaves regardless while awaiting its fate...
But you are fortunate. This place is calm, the wolves keep their
distance
and you can forget that the flock that you tend belongs to
another:
it must have been months since your master last came to call.
God bless you – must go – the night will be old before I reach
home.
The moth of the evening is fluttering, shedding its silver of
dusk.
* Attila József (1905-1937), Hungarian poet.
3. Upon a Jabbering Palm
Upon a jabbering palm-tree
crouching, I should be rather,
a free soul in earthly matter,
shivering, away from heaven;
where sage scholastic apes
would keep me company,
their calls, like a sharp and shiny
shower, wash over me;
and I would chant with the team
in a merry cacophony,
and cheer the harmony
of their rumps and noses whose shades
of blue would seem the same...
Above my enchanted tree
a giant sun would pace,
and I would be ashamed
for the human race:
the apes would grasp my pain,
for still, the apes are sane –
and, Oh! in their company
if I might share their merciful
good death beneath that tree...
Miklós Radnóti
Translated from the Hungarian and Edited by Thomas Land
Miklós Radnóti, 1909-1944, poet, murdered in the Hungarian
Holocaust. Other work by Thomas Ország-Land published by
Snakeskin appears in Over Land, Over Sea: Poems for Those
Seeking Refuge (Five Leaves) and Random Red Candles, an
anthology grouping the best of Candelabrum Poetry Magazine,
1970-2010 (Spinnaker), both released in 2015.
If you have any comments on these poems, Thomas Land would be
pleased to hear from you.
