Poetry L – The Recusant

Poetry L

Thomas Ország-Land

THE SPARK by HANNA SZENES

Translated from the Hungarian

& Edited

by Thomas Ország-Land

THE EXECUTION 70 years ago of the poet Hanna Szenes (1921-1944) was marked in her native Budapest by a series of civic events on November 7. She emigrated as a Jewish youth to Palestine to escape rising Fascism in Europe, and eventually joined the British Army there. She was parachuted into partisan-held territory in Croatia, from where she trekked to neighbouring Hungary with a dual mission to rescue downed Allied aircrews and assist the Zionist resistance to the mass murder of Jews. She was betrayed, imprisoned, tortured and murdered. Today, she is revered as a war hero – and her songs, mostly about love, faith and nature, are sung the world over.

This spark would gladly burn out

by igniting a flame,

her life would be fulfilled

in a flame igniting a blaze.

This spark would gladly give all

for a blaze to light up the hearts,

a blaze to light up the world

and raise a hope for life.

II.

Just seven steps: the length

of this cell.

Two steps across. I can even tell

how long my life will last.

Just seven days, at the least.

That’s a week.

I might perhaps last out the month,

but I must not doubt the end.

I won’t be twenty three

in July.

I knew the risks. The stakes were high.

I played for life. I lost.*

==============================================

*This was the poet’s final testimony. The poem appears in Survivors: Hungarian Jewish Poets of the Holocaust, an anthology translated and edited byThomas Ország-Land (Smokestack Books/England, 2014).

I enclose a very topical poem translated from the Hungarian of György Faludy, a towering figure of European literature, that you will perhaps consider for publication. (I am a poet and award-winning foreign correspondent writing from London and my native Budapest. My poetry appears in current, forthcoming or very recent issues of Acumen, Ambit, The London Magazine, The Jewish Quarterly, The Hungarian Quarterly and Stand.) I hope to hear from you.

Yours, with best regards,

Thomas

(Copy follows)

György Faludy:

The Germans’ Mercenaries

Translated from the Hungarian

& Edited

by Thomas Ország-Land

HEY-HO!… we are that shabby lot,

the Germans’ infamous mercenaries,

who do not care if the officers march us

over the mountains or down the plain

to slaughter peasants or lords or priests

for fun or gain or the hangman’s rope.

We have campaigned on all terrains,

laid waste to land and lives and churches,

and torched the city of Breda and chased

its terrified children fleeing the flames

because we are that shabby lot,

the Germans’ infamous mercenaries.

HAVE YOU seen an innocent child

raided by marauding soldiers?

That is how we were pressed into service

and kitted out with flags and armour

and trained by the whip that made us fit

for our shameful trade, hey-ho! –

tormenting you while you’re defenceless,

smashing your infant’s scull on your wall,

invading your bed, abusing you in it,

avoiding a fight when we cannot win it,

because we are that shabby lot,

the Germans’ infamous mercenaries.

WE’VE DEVASTATED seven counties

and climbed the seven hills of Rome

and taken a blood bath in the heat

and taken a mud bath in the autumn

and waded across vast snowbound fields

and quenched our thirst by filthy snow,

and baked to the south of the River Po

and swam like rats across the Meuse

and fed on locusts and fallen horses

and heard and uttered horrible curses

because we are that shabby lot,

the Germans’ infamous mercenaries.

WE RECOGNIZE no father, mother,

we cut down every apple tree

and poison every well we find

and serve any cause that pays us well.

Without a word, or thought or even

hatred, we guzzle up your wine

and seize and cart away your chattels,

and kidnap, rape and sell your child…

and you must thank us before we go

or we shall brain you by your gate

because we are that shabby lot,

the Germans’ infamous mercenaries.

THE YEARS march on like mercenaries…

Dismissed from service mercilessly,

one day we’ll doze, old fools, on benches,

too frail to bear old Frundsberg’s blade.*

We’ll drag our ailing hulks in pain

on aging feet beset by gout,

from court to fort and meekly seek

your charity: just a crust of bread

and just a scrap of love to last us

until the final port, where the devil

wonders: Where is that useless lot,

the Germans’ infamous mercenaries?

HEY-HO!… we are that shabby lot,

the Germans’ infamous mercenaries,

who do not care… (Reprise)

=============================================================

* Georg von Frundsberg (1473-1528), German warrior, his name adopted by a panzer division of the Waffen SS, the multi-ethnic fighting force of the German Nazi Party. The historical setting of this poem – published anonymously in 1937 in protest against Hungary‘s alliance with Nazi Germany – was intended to deflect the wrath of the authorities. György Faludy (1910-2006), a towering figure of European literature, spent much of his life in political prison or exile. More of this poetry appears in Survivors: Hungarian Jewish Poets of the Holocaust translated & edited by Thomas Ország-Land (Smokestack Books, England, 2014).

FAKING WHOOPEE

We’re on a mission saving you every penny!

Both premise and brash promise (like how many?)

imply a simply vast benevolence,

pace The Morrisons Experience.

What lies behind those words, what truth, if any?

Revalue life, the best Free Gift, and save far more

by mere avoidance of a big bluff Superstore.

Epitaphs for the Blessed Margaret

Graffito For A Grave

Writ large on a wall

somewhere in Brixton: IRON

LADY? RUST IN PEACE

Shopping For The Nation

Her greed-grocer mind

spelled Upward Mobility

whatever the price

Early Learner In The Class Struggle

Young ‘Snobby Roberts’

reinvented herself, moved

on, waging worse wars

Osborne at Her Obsequies

A clown’s tears, facile:

they’re all in this together,

Tory crocodiles!

Alexis Lykiard

April 2013

Andrzej Łyszkowicz

Terrifying Fruit

Like a magnifying glass

against the dark sun

training violence and vice

on a tiny speck of arm.

So the body in its minute

part experiences the pain

and horror of murder,

torture and abuse.

To say: this is real, and real;

To say: this is not real, not real.

But the seed has been sown

so it will grow to bear

its terrifying fruit.

Blind Night

It’s a blind night that speaks to you —

let it spill under your heel

Change

The improbability of change

hit him in the gut

with the impact of a bullet.

He stirred his coffee carefully,

looked at it,

poured it into the sink.

Never again will he

fool himself into believing.

The Edifices of Tomorrow

When the waiting ends

the hours sigh with regret

drop one by one,

retired soldiers of forgotten campaigns.

It’s no longer possible

to buy you flowers or go for a walk.

Let’s storm the edifices of tomorrow,

fill them with cries of joy and terror.

Dorina Brândusa Landén

BEGINNING OF THE CENTURY

In this part of the world there aren’t mismatches.
The king is returning from hunting.
The Prime Minister is dining.
I have catarrh.

My legs treading on snow
leave black traces on the diffusing white
like a war photograph
where all the dead are the young.

The air in your lungs burst
underwater bombs and my own body
became a deadly weapon
in line with the global trend
of self-destruction.

Happy mornings tumbled down
my life drops like a magic ball
in the world there is minus 38 degrees
and snow breaks the bowed branches.

From an immense geyser of ice
one can hear a vague vibration
as a distant hum of bumble bees
one can hear the too fast beating of the arteries
of those who live
under a law of its own collapse into nothingness.

Reindeers are crawling through the snow.
On the road the elk are hit by cars.
Selfishness
increases like a zygote of an enhanced race.

Candidates to government sneer
from a smattering wall poster
creditors are lurking around the corner
bread and honey aroma
thieves are stretching their cold tentacles
to steal your soul and money.

Shareholders investors
very rich people
overly benevolent
overwhelm us with an equivalent compassion
with our smothered desire.
Losers and bankrupts
failures
people with empty eyes like nests
driven by flocks of mist wander
on roads that lead nowhere.

I think of them as trees in the forests
where innocent wild beasts find death
woods percolated too much
by roots pulling up the sap
from bodies that have perished without a trace.

Suddenly angry blizzards fall
and wave the rolling seas
stormy Atlantic oceans
will cover us later
with the roar of the white foam kissing our faces
the uproar of the departures
towards the paradise where we’ll wake up
on resigned shores of countries that
we’ve forgotten how to serve
due to the mundane life – unbearable –
and to the maddening constraints.

Oh, many things are happening here
and beyond horizons the unfathomable vaults

indifference is strangling us
with braided straps of incantation
of those times when we were sharing
more shadow than light.

In the world we’ve created
there’s no more room between us.
We’re doomed
in the anxiety of the beginning of the century
in the circle where we’re locked
me and you
all and sundry

never to leave it again.

Art

On the snowy field furrowed by blizzard
with pale drifts you come
sliding on a sleigh of sentiments
from mountains grounded up by frost
towards the lake where the moon washes its metal
a white path flawless carved

hither now and then
let’s have a wander: to stay for a moment
up on the hill in the silvery forest
above the smog
from city of glass and stone
which I left
without ever going back.

Knife a Heedless Heart of the Day

Here is the afternoon!
The sun is stuck in a hard orange peel
a bird cries
the sweetness of the syllables is a dewdrop
on a leaf.
A beautiful life.
My blood is loaded with them.

Crossroads of words
friends intolerably bright
in search of their own navels
each saying whatever they believe they should say
with a mathematical logic of reduction
wherewith odds and ends are burned.
The multiplication table is smashed into smithereens
someone is killing the sins the fears
the common places the boredom.
The knife – a heedless heart of the day

cuts the bread.
Fish and wheat. The promise.
Roads on which are returning
hungry children at home
while others eat galore
from their scarcity.
Someone
flips my clarity.
Oceans are pools of water
mountains
are splinters of flint in the forbearingly grass
winter’s a village covered with flour.

Midnight
the stars the traffic lights.
Insomnia.
Buffalo and foxes are running
on a half full moon
a nightingale is filling the void
with its golden aorta.
The guard lit its lantern
the hunter recognizes
the pugs.

Nobody saw me crying
though my sadness rakes my temples.

Morning comes as a blow to the plexus.

Dorina Brândusa Landén

Eyes

Suddenly my eyes can see everything:
things as they are
the grass and the animals
the air vibrating above the road
the enraged cars.

Showers of vulnerable and irenic people
who will care for the tomorrow’s gardens
will solve the social problems
will start revolutions among the dunes
in this side of the century
where we remorseless love each other.

Over our heads pure banners
or just our skin
under which we are marching
until we become alike one another
legally and ravaging.

Images that heap

up to the edge of the latter
and the most feeble
from the vault of my breath.

The old saying is that over that ancient bridge
the Vikings the Romans the Goths went
terrible with their faces towards the wind
all of them lost in the history
in a legendary time
and they say: go ahead
found your own vein!

At the fourth pillar
I hit my forehead
I remain dizzy
as if time space and I
have collided
and a sudden blow
has separated us.

The horses of night are trotting through my flesh
my heart rate runs
at normal parameters
I deliver empathy feelings words
I exploit myself

working up my life
I vociferate
ignoring the misleading understandings
that my peers do amongst themselves.

What I’m expecting from you?
What I’m expecting from myself
now when I gather
more past than future?
To go further
to walk carefully
not to break my neck
I can’t go back
although I know – for the final
there are further solutions.

CHURCH OF THE NATIVITY

(Bethlehem, 2011)

Pilgrims kiss cold slab,

cross themselves on those old stones:

dense crowds queue outside

RELIGIONIST CREDULITY

(Jerusalem, 2011)

More genuflection

than genuine reflection –

it’s a sad mad world!

OLD HERB-SELLER

(Damascus Gate, 2011)

Soldiers clear her off:

none impedes the Friday tide

to the Wailing Wall

BETHLEHEM SOUVENIR

(2011)

Buy your crown of thorns

at the Prince Of Peace Bazaar

facing Stars & Bucks

DIFFERENCES

Orthodox folk wear

odd hats and hair – grim outfits

mark out the faithful

YOUR ATTENTION PLEASE!

(Tel Aviv Airport announcement)

Carrying weapons

is prohibited in all

the Terminal Halls

AT THE CHECKPOINT

Passports and papers

taken, we wait in the car,

worried for our host

PALESTINIAN FRIENDS

Hospitality

from the poor and oppressed – gift

that should shame us all

BULLY FOR SOME

Underdog admires

übermensch, seizing each chance

to strut, steal or kill

PROMISED LAND

New walls, new orders…

Lebensraum mocks old borders:

“Arabs need ghettoes”

Alexis Lykiard

March 2011

DEBIT WHERE IT’S DUE

(A malediction)

Tony Blair and Gordon Brown –

formerly kings of London town.

Tony Brown and Gordon Blair,

played taxing roles with perks of power to share.

Blair swaggered and Brown scowled – their erstwhile flair

seemed lost in one smug juggling-act! Flawed pair

worth our derision now… Socialist votes weren’t there

to support war, financial greed, lies and hot air.

Grinning Blair or frowning Brown?

A vision of the Left, let down!

Alexis Lykiard

MCs – for Mercenary Colonials

To cheers they march! Air: “Soldiers of the Queen, my lads”.

Cue smart salutes. The price of glory’s rarely learned

by little guys with mythic status dearly earned,

safeguarding native Brits from big bad foreign cads.

Plucky stars of every distant battle circus

needn’t repine for further bounty or rewards,

apart from gratitude the Commonwealth affords.

Strange attitudes may tarnish military workers…

Don’t medals suffice? What else rattled those Gurkhas?

Alexis Lykiard

Thomas Ország-Land

The Patriarch

Since I was young, I’ve been the youngest

and worshipped Venus in the sacred

and fragrant colonnades of even

her humblest serving maids.

Some of the time I’ve managed to

ignore the silly rules, and valued

a graceful poem higher than

a contract of employment.

And thus I’ve spent my life surrounded

by books and children. Now my grandson

advises me to act my age.

Outrageous innocence!

Poor stranger, I’ve been younger than you

for longer than you would remember.

I’ve celebrated life so long

I am too old to change.

Quincy Lehr

Apartments

No ghosts as yet, but just a hint of fever

(the fan’s still in its box) and foreign noise.

A virgin phone squats on its new receiver.

Undusty window sills are bare but ready

for clocks, for brown, anaemic plants, their poise

temporary, fragile and unsteady.

There have been other places, across the river,

or oceans, time zones—other furniture,

with curtains cutting light to just a sliver,

those old apartments populated still

with women whom you recollect as ‘her’.

They haven’t called; you doubt they ever will.

Each lease becomes an act of… not forgetting,

but somehow letting go. Old places live

with different faces in a familiar setting:

lives you’ll never know, but comprehend,

scenes of errors not yours to forgive,

broken hearts no longer yours to mend.

Let there be light!

And in the beginning, there was nothing,

or what there always was, and is, perhaps,

flawed symmetry, as the child was born,

the act of birth the act of replacement

implying obsolescence,

the loss of vigour, blurred sight,

the often-repeated joke,

the punch line like a show in syndication,

the actors long since dead,

floating into the ether of living rooms.

Robert Lietz

Birth: January 20, 1946

Place: Syracuse, New York

OCEAN AUDIENCE (2)

Should you import such images, alerted by sines

and contraband, by natural restrictions,

leathers digging in, finding the sun above the house,

the scythe-blade dulled and slopes

made dangerous, the shadows indoors restored,

what would there be to do

except to see lives graduate, adopt their readiness

to grip, except, as one absorbed, and one

with them, to seem as one within the script, and with

the light let fall behind the cardinal draperies,

happy as meals were, as uninventoried light

deciding on a subject? And here,

among the spellbound-still accoutrements, left-overs

concentrate, in love and motion still,

and their phenomenally touched selves, seeing

their lawns to snuff or pouring off their own,

in rooms where lives conceived becoming something once,

in pillared rooms and sleeplessness

and dreadful circulation, warped frames

and needle-stitch, their scythes

made dull for every pass through the sandgrasses,

and love’s morphologies, and the kempt lawns

turned by the beach-skies to hyperscripts. Why

wouldn’t you cheer with them such nights

when home-squads dominate, seeing them cheered

themselves, or handing their bodies off

in lexial harmonics, thrilled by the first

good tune, by the cacoons

and plastics scratching frost-hewn stones, mothers

coming to be, there on the eve of everything,

and children, evolved dimensionally, gliding

among the cloud-drifts and the painted trees,

over the front lawns taking time and personalized?

So much for the decades practicing.

So much for the hall doors, the varnished

and adult mystery, deepening

weekend dreams, deepening the hobbies woven,

the skeletal awkwardness

and household interests, for living old

and off, hearing the tall grass sob,

seasonally drawn and stretched, and seeing

the wheat hued light assume

a steeper influence, following the scores

and story-lines and satellite attentions,

the pre-venting scripts, centripetal gradients

and chills, caculated back to stasis

and to outlet benefits.

BREAKING IN

Filling a page when he might just as well

have filled a page, he likes the raw materials

the ammonia-haunted bowls, expressions the old men shared

among the riggings and the fiscs,

susceptible to prompts, to the motions just behind

the layings-on and arrogance. Verve deepens

in the templates, in the course of vegetables, in every

leisure to know, leaving the closed shops caught

and the keen edge of argument, fingers clearing out

the cache, spilling the ghostly fruit, the ghosts

already gone into the lull on entering, deepening

the whispers in old port and in the dream-souffles.

He’ll let the barn-mice jig, he thinks, wearing

the scraps of festival, perked and erudite, subverting

the swaggers afterward, the children worrying

their lives, and every awkward emphasis, having

these ermine, egg-white, scarlet points

to get across, and doubling the detachment

when their good fun’s done.

David LaBounty

Gun

Wearing sunglasses in January,

she was thin and buzzing

like coffee and bumblebees

with a face blurred by makeup

and the vagueness that comes

between thirty-five and fifty.

She was trying to write a check

for something like tires or maybe

brakes for a Buick but she couldn’t

find her license, so in harried anger

dumped the contents of her purse

on top of my counter and it was all there:

the lipstick, cell phone, eye liner, Ipod,

wallet & a small black tiny gun that spun

like a top as soon as it hit the counter.

That, she said as she scooped the gun

back into her purse, was a huge pain in

the ass to get: I had to sit in a crowded

CCW class at the county building

with all kinds, young and old, white and black,

male, female, gay and straight and they

were all so happy and scared just to be

able to carry a gun and, of course,

I got fingerprinted and there was a long

line for that too, something like fifty deep

at eight o’clock on a Tuesday morning

and there I was already late for work

but I just had to have this because you know

how it is these days…

and finally, the check

was written, and a few days later, bounced back.

impotence

lately, there have been no words

as ideas have stopped flowing through

my head even though I keep typing away

like a junkie trying to tap into an overused vein.

My typing produces nothing save

half-baked poems like the one I thought

about this morning while stuck at the light,

an ancient Chrysler minivan in front of me

with it’s white paint peeling and a bumper sticker

that said, My Daughter is in the US Army.

I thought about the daughter.

I thought she might be short and squat

and I could see her in some desert

with a rifle in her hand, her hair

greasy and tucked into her hat,

her body shapeless and vague

in camouflage fatigues.

And then I imagined the daughter

coming home, getting married,

driving a minivan of her own

with the paint peeling away.

The light turned green, the van went straight

and I turned right, the poem quickly died

and I started to think what I could do

to make it move.

The Silence of the Suburbs

The silence of the suburbs,

ebony still.

Coolly gazing heaven

loosely fingers

the half moon,

and stars puff sleepily

into the shawl of the dark.

The last jet of nightfall

lumbers upwards,

grudgingly,

with 400 new adventurers

tightly dreaming

of what will be.

And there below

is fat Jim Ferry

rolling

from the rumble-mumble electric train.

“There’ll be a better tomorrow,”

his sozzled heart grumbles,

and he loosens his tie

in anticipation

of what will never come.

The half moon is hazy now

and the stars yawn,

“it’s just another jet

in the clasping smoke of still.”

Fat Jim Ferry looks to the skies.

“Clouds,”

he whispers,

alone.

The silence of the suburbs,

ebony still.

Lunchtime Black

She sits

only for an hour.

But,

there is no golden revelation

at the bottom of a snatched paper cup.

No answer

between nervous bites

from a wilted balsa wood sandwich.

Not even

a smile to the sun,

as she beats away the swarm

of office edicts,

will set her free.

Just a hope

that she is not another face

amongst this conjurors’ madness of souls.

That alone

may see her through.

Do What’s Good For You

“Dirty seaweed,”

mother says.

“Put it down

and eat your burger.”

Roberta Lawson

Cento

Finally, he wants to write…

The secrets of the girls childhood

finally tumbled –

especially if they’ve been mishandled.

Reassuring benefits

dress in a handy, pocket-sized format.

Fancy.

(You don’t need to do anything.

This is not the novel he wants to write;

this reassuring tracker of girls.)

These balls of community dough

not recommended for

pregnant women:

The benefits of a

fancy dress blood donor.

You don’t need to do anything

for the fullest, most rewarding life.

Balls of dough, mishandled

like lactating women

speak of this soon…

Handy, pocket-sized secrets

for a serious buyer.

Wind-Down

Later in the day than

either of us knew existed.

Wrapped up in quiet night-time

and the slow-heat of your body,

curled sage & incense wafts

wind about the room with

their unfurling fingers.

You ask the wrong question,

and like strange magic

my tears begin

a silent procession.

‘Sweetie, what

on earth is wrong?’

you ask me, blinking.

I guess I just felt safe.

PA Levy

when the boys come home

the girls working

in the flag factory

widows-to-be

out pouring

all their semaphore poetry

wait for their boys

with well rehearsed folds

they’ve seen it many times

on prime time news broadcasts

pulsing hearts

pulsing he

pulse

half mast