Imre Oravecz
Poems
Translated by Jascha Kessler
Future Imperfect
Befejezetlen jövõ
A private house in some Cleveland, or Chicago, or Barstow suburb,
four bedrooms, two baths, living room, a den on the ground floor,
two-car garage, and a big basement with a ping-pong table,
neat lawn all around,
ornamental hedges lining the driveway, no fence,
wife, four kids, two grandchildren,
good job, secure income,
bank account, credit cards,
two cars, an RV,
dog, cat,
big dinner at night all together and great talk,
nice neighbours, good friends, relatives,
golfing, baseball games, following the play-offs,
travel abroad (one to Yucatan),
hiking (Adirondacks, Wisconsin woods, Sierra Nevada),
winter vacations in Florida, Hawaii,
Sunday barbecues in the backyard in summer,
steaks or chicken drumsticks, lots of salad,
tortilla chips for the hot cheddar dip, jalapeños, bourbon,
hickory charcoal smoke rising refulgent,
flowers, bugs, butterflies,
clear skies, sunny days
calm and peace, far and near,
now and then laughter hooting from somewhere,
and the ice-cream truck’s cheery bells sounding nearer
that’s my life, had I decided to live it there
or been born there, or stayed on there,
I wonder, would it have been better,
or wouldn’t I have had to confront what was coming to me anyway,
and been a burden moreover to my family?
Testimonial
Vallomás
Here I stand,
my dear brothers and sisters
and, oh, here are you,
those merely unskilled workers,
all laid out in neat rows
above the meadow
on the cool north slope
of this graveyard, packed
solid side by side,
one marked, another not,
you’re everywhere I turn,
right, left, up, down,
in the center, on top of the hill next to the road,
all over the place,
hidden by earth,
so many, a whole congregation,
that even if you rose to return now
you wouldn’t go to the village,
though when you were here
you tried hard enough—
to have something more,
to do better,
not that you murmur, or argue,
you don’t make a sound,
even to complain when your bones are dug up
and thrown away,
I knew a lot of you once,
and really loved some of the old folks
because they were gentle with me
when I was a kid,
they gave me prunes in the threshing days,
or showed me how to braid a whip to crack,
but not all of you were known to me,
all those centuries when you were brought out here,
and by the time I came most of your graves had sunk down
and were lost forever beneath the grass,
and yet you’re never strangers to me,
and it seems I’ve met you all once and often,
as though together we’d done or wanted so much,
I’m tied to you,
I’m your kin,
I come out of you,
my hands, my chest, my back, my legs
I had from you and maybe even
the writing of poems,
I’m just like you when
you lived here desiring and hoping,
the same obstinate pride,
same defects, same virtues,
inclined to melancholy and despair,
and yet full of dreams, and courage,
strong, steady, and persistent
in whatever I take a notion to try,
happy when it goes,
and looking at the world the way you did
before your souls departed,
I may not understand
its laws, though I regard them closely
and with respect,
remembering what you do,
the wheat field in July at harvest time,
the flash of a girl’s thigh as she beats the flax,
we’re alike in everything,
and what I hope for
is to be with you,
carried out here when my time comes,
allotted a place here with you,
and granted my silence in chorus with yours.
Imre Oravecz
is a poet and translator, who has published five volumes of verse. These poems are from Halászóember (Fishing Man, 1998), a poetic autobiography. On several occasions he has spent time in the United States.
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