Age Meets Beauty

by Thomas Ország-Land (November 2017)

Robert Graves

 

The Jewish-Hungarian poet György Faludy (1910-2006) married Fanny Kovács, a fellow Jewish-Hungarian poet, in 2002. Faludy, an outstanding literary figure and a relentless opponent of both Fascism and Communism, is at last winning his rightful place in Western literature.
 

György Faludy and Fanny Kovács

Age Meets Beauty
 
And what did that old goat Faludy do with Fanny

six decades his junior? We lowered our gaze. We knew

this hour was a rare enchanted flower of fulfillment.

She glowed like a pear tree at dawn in the dew.

 

And what about Robert Graves with his lady students

Some say he swam with them in a cove of his island,

and the women came and came . . . and came.

 

And what shall I do with you, my cheeky darling,

when slowly the days must fade and the shadows grow?

May your passion ignite in the blaze of the sunset.

May my love be the source of your glow.

 

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Thomas Ország-Land, a Holocaust-survivor, is an award-winning poet and foreign correspondent who writes for New English Review from Europe and the Middle East. He participated in the October 1956 anti-Soviet Budapest revolution and later read philosophy at Acadia University, Canada. His last book was Survivors: Hungarian Jewish Poets of the Holocaust (Smokestack, 2014).
 
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