What you really are
Is this:
You are but a shadow
And with shadows you fight
Your love is a shadow
And so
You cast your happy hopes
In melting shapes,
Past and fleeting
- Your life is a blotted image
Cast on strangers' lives,
Your very past is a shadow,
Like your tomorrow.
Only your heart looms
Large, heavy, dark
Like gloom
unexpiated
The Geonoms
The Geonoms drink fresh seawater on the shore,
Stand around in a row, white-clad like snow.
They adore the sun and sing to it divine songs and psalms,
They give to it sacrifices, alms.
In the middle of the night blackgartered, holy-faced men
In the height of ecstasy, try to bring redemption
By calling God in several names, incantations
Fending off temptations
Their black robes spread solemnly and sweep the weeds
God pushes them gently and smashes them into the sea
And the wind comes and sweeps after them the sand from weeds
Their black robes blow and sail on the surface of the water
Night covers them, the forsaken robes twinkle, rise and fall in the waves.
Melenos, the beggar
Why do you, Melenos, stick to that door,
Standing there as if forever begging for entrance,
Holding your hat, ringing your little bells?
Sticking out your hands, stricken by leprosy?
Haggard lines grow on your face, and children
Avoid you wide, in a circle
Covering their eyes behind hands of innocence,
Thus do you hold here vigil, with your empty eyes,
Bent brow, hoarse fiery face, a live scare-crow as you are
Eating your slow offal from your meaty rag.
Sitting in the stillness of the twilight of stars,
/on the stairs, with tears in your eye-sockets.
Lying in the stillness on the stairs, heavily breathing in
/the dew-soaked night.
Do you think the gates will ever open?
Do you think to sprout yet? Do you still expect
The skies to open, the the stars to pour grace?
Fat Lady on the Bus
The behind Of this big fat lady is so selfcertain. She is
satisfied with life. She
has had her sons, her body is complacent,
her belly
is satisfied, fulfilled, absolutely
Reassured, complacent.
She is going home after having done her shopping,
Her big bulging package of groceries,
The watermelon, raddish, the flour, the chocolate
is continuous with her big bulging motherly breasts.
She cooked so many good dinners
Tasting good to her
After trying a little bit of it on the tip of her tongue and
adding a grain of salt or pepper
clicking with her tongue, as if to say
It is good, and all the children
Will all around the table raise a big racket
Demanding more and more,
And her husband will open his shirt after his beer
And show his healthy hairy chest all around the place
And pinch her bottom and say - it was a toothsome dinner,
Now she is going home on the bus, sitting against me,
And she will begin to cook on arriving home,
And smack, just so, between her and herself,
And chase her sons to play outside the room
Outside the house, so
That they do not bother her incessantly
With their questions, what had she brought home
From the marketplace.
Whenever
Whenever you lie in the midst of the Absolute Unity
Neither desiring, nor having an end to attain,
Doing your daily duty, beyond the which there lie only the dim fields of shadow,
,
The fog slowly rising, filling the crevices,
Neither the past having now any immediate importance,
pressing its devices on your consciousness,
Nor the future scintillating before your inner eyes with fears depressing, or promises,
Ho, holy equivalence,
All the antinomies, contradictions tearing your brain apart asleep,
Gathered back into their primeval shell, whence
They once commenced, broke forth, to wreak havoc in the world
or to make it very interesting,
Oh, holy Nirvana
Wholly content
Neither absorbing nor
Very radiant,
Neither curious nor
Wishing to teach
Now you lie asleep
On the bosom of the world.
A cloudless day
I am expanding my ego
Please come to me you all
All those who are only memories
Sweet fleeting entities,
All encompassing substances, egos
All the floating remnants of the day.
Come you all
Those who hate and are not reconciled,
All those in whose heart still glows, like a hot red ember
Some past insult, maybe unintended,
A part of a fleeting idea, never to be forgotten,
Forgiven, like a strange placard,
But oh, yea, even some sudden trespass
On their sacrosanct, most hidden wishes.
Come you all, then, those
For whose love I yearned for lengthy years,
And those who pass me by in the morning, on the way to the bus, Their brows wrinkled with angry care.
I am looking forward meeting you
In the forsaken, empty corners of the streets,
Gray pavement,
I want to soothe your heart
Unawares
To smooth the wrinkles
In some undefended moment
That you may remember me
With a smile
With a kiss on your hearts
With a cloudless day
This Long Summer Day
This long summer day, drowsy with dew
and the distant faraway dim humming of the bees
Beauty discernible, audible, and the sunshine
on the velvet petals,
And the soul almost dozing off inside this happy equanimity
Needing now nearly nothing
Completely full of the now or the near future,
This fleeting reality, not very persistent
Dim memory of a shade of light,
Of sounds never returning, fields
Not here, not evermore, never to return �
Sometimes in the Sun
Walking the paths of life
You walk sometimes in the sun.
Things in your mind grow
Even your heart
Finds new ways to love,
Realizes for each step a new way to beauty,
A new fun, a new way to live, to breath.
Then the sun hides again,
and, getting to walk in the shadow
Your heart feels dead again.
On the bus
The motor, the loose windows in their frames
The noise of the street, the murmuring voices,
All the turbulent phenomenon of the noisy street
Contribute to create this spherical
music, music of no Place nor Time.
The mind floats amid colorful rags of memories,
Amidst the waves, moved by the winds,
Catching some strolling-by ideas from the
Foam and froth,
Trying to rearrange them between unfixed
Points of time,
Trying to appoint them a point of departure
A point of destination.
An outcast from the warm inside
Of the mellifluous, soporific womb of the bus
You step down the stairs and meet the rushing
Solid good reality of the earth,
Rising towards you, (and, for a last and lost minute
- While stepping down, your head is stiill far above -)
The land springs towards your seven-mile-jumping-boot
And the people with their everyday faces
Come and go and you mingle in the crowd
Disappearing
Between them on the hard pavement of solid
nonbeing,
institutional nonentity
Repose of evening
She has turned away her face,
She sits, her head supported by the sopha,
No, - but her face doesn't touch the dark smooth plush
She feels the radiance
Having left her
The hue of her face, like an apple's
changed from deep crimson into brown
She feels the last glowing embers on her face
Barely discernible
(And the hands are heavy and the limbs and breast inert
And plumper than last year)
She realizes the past fled happiness
- and the sudden inertia of sex and thee
sudden change of heart
She is now old, very old and courageous, reclining on the sopha
Her husband in his deep fouteille by the fire,
Gazes through the grate and tries to poke the embers
That is the time to look around,
To redefine our situation in the world. -
Life
Life is a race
In which you chase
Yourself
An aim
You never can reach
The Clod
Good morrow, dear, farewell
These are our words to say you bye
Words of endearment and love
To surround you by our estimation
And I find myself to be at a loss
At seeing you so self-content and exuberant
Although I find you nothing but a clod.
This is a word I think best to explain.
A clod, as I mean it, is certainly only a piece of material
Lying around on the fields, near to some dunghill,
Believe me, an old and dried up refuse
and bathing in the sun
of uncertain origin or ingredients
Greyish-green and hard, no radiance and no absorption
Neither acting nor to be acted upon
dully reflecting the lights
not even a piece of dung, which enhances life
but a useless kind of an undescript material
THIS WRIGGLING, UNCONSCIOUS PIECE OF EARTH
This wriggling, selfunconscious piece of earth Full of sinews and veins
Waking us in the morning with its uneasiness,
Inveigling us with just fears that it goes to die;
In the middle of our Grand Guignol, our creation;
The white sweat on our brows burning in endeavors of healing;
In endeavors to recreate around us the world;
Ho, vain hopes to overcome it all.
Perspicacious wriggling, inspite of past hopes, the inevitable,
The inevitably coming, our future in the scintillions of light,
In the light-years to come, our utmost, the highest,
the irremovable, our Being,
The intangible entity, to enable whose meagre
light to scintillate a little
was the very task of our body on this earth.
How nice it is now
How nice it is now � sometimes
A piece of life (with its aura) put much behind you
With all the bounds that held you, and you were obliged to them
The people expecting you to behave, nay, to think in a certain way, And you, being confined in the very four walls of eternity.
No outlet, no perspective on your deeds possible. (or - so it seems).
And � of course! You were supposed to be a certain being,
Not to extend your boundaries, as they are not apt, or acceptable in your situation.
Or even those who put you there
Accepting your constrictions as natural �
And then suddenly years pass and this very kind of reality
Regressing slowly in the past and giving space in you
To new realities, new hues and ways of life
Freeing in you new energies, and now you may
Look beyond the walls, look beyond those reaches of careful counting out your ways,
These walls that were the must of your life, but also
So many heavy ballast, weights weighing on your soul.
Those hard, fighting people
Those hard, fighting people Getting ripe in old age, sitting
Under the greenleaved fig-tree
Become so mellow and complying.
Now they understand you.
Quietly they listen, maybe with a smile,
Hearing out their partners' complaints,
Looking in the meanwhile into their darkblue eyes,
Full even of love and compassion.
Now they really feel they are a part of life,
Having fathomed some of its irretrievable meanings, only partly,
For fleeting moments apparently.
Now only they feel they really understand life and people,
Or that they even could help them and endure.
Their forehead is washed in halo
An inner light promising to wash even their opponents
In the refreshing waters of embalming eternity.
Ringing up
I want to call mother by the phone. Where are you
Because I � Still here. And how are you now. Dust in Auschwitz. The address is known. Do you have
Still self-consciousness. If you ever have known your life
Walking Vaczi-sreet, the main-street of Pest, town of priests, so compassionate -
The Jews were shot, their blood in the Danube. But, after all, you hover high above all this, mother eternal, of that
Nobody could rob you, - after all, you were meant to be something, if not a wife cosily sitting with her husband
Near the fire, which mostly you weren't,
Nor a proletarian worker, usually unemployed , embroidering
with Hungarian tulips and suchlike patterns and flowery flourish gloves and stockings for meagre fees, occasional chores,
After all, all these will not be registered in the heavenly tablets as your true vocation,
As if by these you fulfilled your calling on the earth. It is impossible. That is hideous to think of,
If you ever were something and meant to be, you were my mother, even if that admittedly does admittedly does not amount to much.
Hello, mother,
From the dust of Poland, the earth frozen with your blood, stay and rise now. Would I could see your face, could you come , even if only in a dream.
But even dreams have become extinct now, since long ago. Even your earthly memory is mingled into the memory of spirits long past and begone. You were united with the Spirit of the Universe - with the World of Ideas, the general pool whence spirits come and where they go.
Thereto your lost son strives, there now he yearns to find you.
To feel you, in the easy touch of your hand stroking his hair, like the light wind in the evenings. Something that attaches, that I may remember belonging to somebody really close, even if he is far away in the unattainable.
This is my desire, that is what I called you back for from the furthest recesses of Not-being and Silence.
That is what I called you back for, to hold your hand again, even if only for a fleeting moment, that I may know:
My heart is with you. And whoever can say a mother's heart his, does not stand alone,
Lost in those vast, empty spaces,
in the eternal abysses,
Opening at the feet of all eternity.
That I am not alone,
That I will see you again
In all eternity.
In a Dream, in a vision of the night, when deep sleep falleth upon men, in slumbering upon the bed (Job 33.15)
I
On my last day on earth
Flowers on the shelf, the large window near the bed, so bright �
And the nurse, bending over, asking for my last request �
What shall I ask of her, now, minutes before I close my eyes forever?
Oh, if you'll just permit me, dear
To touch your breasts, the everlasting source of life�
II
Or to lie so
On my back
And against me, in the music-channel
Somebody explains and then plays Bach and Pergolesi
To fall asleep while listening to the heavenly sounds
Of celestial music
III
When Leda was about to die (from multiple sclerosis)
She came to me to say good bye
I haven't seen her for 25 years
Since 1963
(She was married to someone else)
And Mr. Mann also wanted to fire me from Bank T., after my 17 years of working there and I was 57
And Mr. Dan Seri also deemed only right to severe our ties and wish me luck
On my way out of the circle of writers he has established with Hanna at his home
(he was well versed in such a firing-kind of activity, being used to it in his capacity as the Head of the Manpower-Department in the nearby Ministry of Agriculture)
And I knew not where to go, it all having come to its dead-end and cul-de-sac
And I knew not my soul any more: I felt being severed from the world and in a pit -
And then
In a Dream, in a vision of the night, when deep sleep falls, in slumbering upon my bed
I felt her hand squeezing mine,
(She said: I am scarce of words -
so she made them two-edged and ambiguous, to hold in them more than one meaning)
And now I thought she came to cast in me courage
But she came only to say good bye
to this site of
