Thomas Ország-Land (September 2017)

 

Monologue On Life and Death

Like some crazed lover kicking up the leaves

along an avenue of autumn trees

with tousled hair beneath a falling sky,

Or like some traveler in a foreign city

who takes an evening stroll upon arrival,

one who looks hither, thither, starved for more

and, in a heated, happy trance, discovers

where all is new: the lit up shop displays,

the colours of the drinks in coffee-houses,

—were they celebrating?

the wild thyme scent of freedom in the air . . .

a city one would never want to leave:

like such a traveler, so I viewed the world.

I knew that everything is but a fleeting 

phenomenon that never can recur.

When I saw butterflies flit by, I thought,

And when I wined with my good friends, I shared

with them my heart and thoughts and words as though 

—because

no friends, no wine and no awakening.

I saw that others also knew that fear: they 

suppressed it while I bore it on my brow

kept warning me that Everything must end, that 

my life was but a spark, a miracle

between the iron tongs of lifeless time,

a flash emitted by a firefly

perched on the hollow palate of decay,

an incandescent hiss of opposites . . .

This visceral, perpetual awareness

of my mortality endowed my life

with flavours, colours, magic and delight, 

inspired and exhilarated me, 

enraptured me and conjured up before me

a fairy castle from my bare existence.

Intoxicated on the planet’s finite,

once only gift of wine, I came to hold 

each notion and each object and each person

as drunkards would embrace and cling to lampposts.

My world thus came alive: the firmament

displayed for me a tapestry of light,

the three dimensions of my space became 

a storehouse packed with bales of rich adventures, 

the face of every clock a banquet table

set for twelve diners, and my passing moments

the dripping of the heavy drops of honey.

And I became a lover of the earth,

a fervent, roaming Romeo of clouds,

a troubadour beneath dead city walls

still carving Gothic ornaments in rhymes,

a priest at midnight rites of naked bathing

. . . till time was up, and I have disappeared,

a passing, brief phenomenon, within

the timeless ocean of phenomena.
 

           (Recsk slave labour camp, Hungary, 1952)

 

 

____________________________________________

 

THOMAS ORSZÁG-LAND is a poet and award-winning foreign correspondent who writes for New English Review on Europe and the Middle East. His last book was Survivors: Hungarian Jewish Poets of the Holocaust (Smokestack, 2014) and his last E-chapbook, Reading for Rush Hour: A Pamphlet in Praise of Passion (Snakeskin, 2016), both in England. His work appears also in current issues of Acumen, Standpoint and The Transnational.
 

To help New English Review continue to publish translations of original poetry such as this, please click here.
 

If you enjoyed this poem and want to read more by Thomas Ország-Land, please click here.