What happened? Don't weep for me my love! I felt
that I had moulted. The fibres of my fate
broke. A hundred rooms, a hundred seasons
shape me suddenly, constructions, demolitions;
(as one could once). Though a turtle dove is cooing
over me for the fourth day, wars have been showing
a rage so terrible none of you could guess.
I hardly can; each minute every sense
is multiplied. Your raw grief looks through me
and in that look it asks where I can be.
Torn limb from limb, I'm in three billion
scatterings! And what? That's not yet shown
to me. Love or electric power? Gold-glass-
atom perhaps, or heatray nucleus.
Light inhabiting space on Saturn. Strange,
but it seems true that the Universe is the range
of a Poet's Brain.-You leaving? The approach
of evening proves I once loved you so very much,
At the Lookout
...kilátón...
Once more I take you over Lake Balaton
and up the lookout. The kiss of the wind is on
your face: that's me! A big round moon is drifting
over jagged Badacsony, its bridging
reflections stretching almost as far as this.
The sacred night is chirping. Can you hear it?
The soul is opened out: so it observes
itself, but over it space pleats its nerves
and between the infinitely high and low
crickets are striking up fortissimo:
the U's are thrumming and the E's are gleaming,
oo-roo-kroo, kri-kri: full everywhere, and teeming
so echoingly, circling like the waves
which take an island in their foam's embrace:
more fully even, as last year, the year before
and as it will be always: weave it in your
substance, and into its texture weave yourself;
you will become a sigh and find relief,
...The Big Blue Meadow...
...a nagy kék réten...
is what you are, a rustling, all at once
the earth, the sky, fire-magic, a sleeper's dance;
you shut your eyes, wind kisses you afresh,
and inside and outside dizzily intermesh,
and singing rings and the meadow swings and hums
and as the beat of your heart borrows its pulse
as if across a globe the breaking light
exploded off you, so the Self sets out,
leaves you, and runs, so grows across the sky
and only when the whole world is inside
and it becomes world's tent and only then
will you see that vanished particle again
-yourself already in the all-embracing
limit of everything, and everything
your viscera... and, stopping suddenly,
your earthly consciousness will be unbound
but safe, the big blue meadow's heavenly
star-set cricket music stir and resound.
(1947)
Translated by Alan Dixon
