For Radnóti
(I wrote this poem for one of my favorite poet Miklós Radnóti. He was a Hungarian poet and wrote poems even in camps and on death marches. In 1944, at just age 35, too weak to continue, he was shot by Hungarian guards.His final verses, found in his pocket, remain among the most haunting in literature.)
Death kept circling around you,
such magnificent poems.
Your postcards reached me.
and yet you kept writing
I know they were not meant for me,
but—
I can hear it—the sounds of artillery coming from Bulgaria.
Even in this chaos, the one you were thinking of—
was it the same one
you wrote about in your poem, “In Your Arms”?
I can see myself among those burning houses and haystacks,
on the edge of that field, smoking pipe,
That little shepherd girl
who steps into the lake, making the water tremble;
those sheep gathered in the water;
the blood hanging from the oxen’s snouts;
the corpse beside which you lie fallen.
Der springt noch auf—
these words I hear clearly.
The blood has dried on my ear.
Was that fourth postcard truly your last poem?
Hungary—your home,
where, far away, the world of your childhood
still sways.
Are you still somewhere deep
among those silent stones?
I too do not know where the poet Mihály Vörösmarty lived.
I have not read a single one of his poems.
I cannot know.
But I can see—
locusts, oxen, church spires, gentle soft fields,
a trembling laborer afraid of his work,
forests, gardens filled with songs, vineyards, cemeteries,
and a small, very old woman
weeping as she walks among the graves.
Below, a lineman’s hut;
in the machine shed’s enclosure, a dog
rolling and playing.
I can feel the scorching air,
the house wall that has collapsed,
the plum tree that has broken.
You too were a poet.
Is that why they killed you?
Are you still composing poems down among the roots?
No rude devil can steal your poems and melodies
You are the poet everyone needs.
I want to write like you,
yet I will never be able to write like you.
Under the shadow of your poems,
I lie at night with my right hand beneath my head.
Tonight the moon is full in the sky.
Get up,my friend,
I am calling you.
Will you rise and walk again?
