It's fading
	 like the two flags that
year by year we'd fix in brackets
over the gate on state holidays,
the world is fading, losing colour.

Where are the holidays now?

Under thick dust,
silent in the hot
attic an entire
world lies dismantled.

The marches have vanished.

A harsh bellowing has overtaken them,
the wind has blown them away.
Poets no longer declaim their celebratory verses,
the wind is writing its own,

its recitation a whirl of dust in tremulous heat
above a paved square.

Extraordinary to think we once loved women here.
Over an age of glowing furnaces,
and taut ropes at full stretch
the uncertain present
hangs like the dust
that sinks beneath it.

Over buildings half abandoned:
those imperial fantasies.

I no longer believe
in what I once believed.
But am daily reminded
that I was a believer once.

Nor do I excuse anyone.

Our terrible loneliness
blisters in the heat of the sun
like rust on rails.

(1971)

No, there was no explosion
merely a collapse.
The thing with the mincer in its bowels,
the thing that cheated others by cheating itself,
that terrified by its sheer appearance,
collapsed without a peep.

May we still think-
corroded from the start by doubt,
giving up the very right to doubt,
an idiot watchman of stale bathwater,
of the water
in which sat a baby-
may he think of liberation?

Can he imagine something like this, he
who has seen it silently fall apart,
sliding apart more readily
than bodies after sex,
more readily than our flesh that sometime
must fall from our bones?

Without a peep it broke up, simply fell to pieces,
nails sliding through a gently rotting plank,
bricks decomposing like marl or potash,
yielding their dry porous substance
slipping from loose cement,
at which time what point in resisting-
beating the ground with ratatat of guns, with mortars,
a ridiculous ascendancy
beating the vacant air
like rain, like rain, like rain.

No, there was no explosion, merely a collapse.
Only it took ages, simply ages
for the swirling of thick damp dust
to form a deposit.
Or is there nothing but the swirling?
The swelling milling damp of it?

The dissolving of a constructed world.

(1971)

They fiddled a little with the state of the world
uncle Imre, uncle Pista's lot.
They were strung up, left to cool their heels.
Uncles Mátyás and Ernő
cleared off to Moscow (let's not even mention the others.)
Thence followed the dispensation of Father Jack.*
'We shall live forever!'
They estimate
the number of corpses
including locals and intruders
between three and thirty-thousand,
It's hard to be sure
so long after the event.,
Reality doesn't reckon with itself.
Does it count itself out? Does it get even?
Unified, indivisible,
it hasn't even learned to count
and flunked out in fourth grade.
Here are two numbers for you:
56
68
You can add them, subtract them,
divide them, multiply them.
Your studies, your unnumbered foul
doctrines are bankrupt.

(1981)

At one particular moment on the twenty-second
(at a quarter to seven in the morning) I, an ominous child
between Joseph S and Jesus,
am thirteen. This is the last
of the festive Christmases. We have plenty
to eat: "the economy of shortage" has parted for granny
like the Red Sea and she has walked through it
complete with dry feet and a turkey. And there were gifts, for me
that is, I having the monopoly of them, my only
cousin being a girl and what's more only four years old,
while I was the only male scion of the family
(at the time at least). Wine-soup, fish-we've got the lot,
considering that is we have just emerged from the shelter
where G.F. kept waving a tommy-gun without
a magazine ("Go somewhere else, Gabby," they said,
"do you want the Russians round our necks?")
Gabby (they'll wait till lilac time to hang him)
comes in to wish us the best of the season,
there's no midnight mass on account of the curfew,
I concentrate on my present, the game of Monopoly,
my auntie having picked it up privately, the toy shops
offering little choice for now. Auntie is effectively
saying goodbye. She is preparing to emigrate
via Yugoslavia, but when it comes to it they fail to meet her
at the border so she's obliged to die at home
of cancer of the spine some eleven years later.
Nobody knows how to play Monopoly,
I am turning the dial on the pre-war Orion radio
picking up London, listening in to America,
just as my mother did in nineteen forty-four
only louder, now you can do it, meaning you can do it for now.
The Christmas tree decorations I can number by heart
affect me much as a woman will many years later,
a woman I loved for many years.
In the morning, barefooted, I flick through the Monopoly cards
breathing in the scent of pine and candles,
bring in a plateful of brawn from the corridor in the yard,
grandmother is cooking already, twisting a lemon,
cuts me a slice of bread with the brawn as I squat on the stool
in pyjamas. A holiday smell, the smell of sleep.
Grandad is coughing in what was once a maid's room,
one terrific loud fit pitches his accountant body
thin as a toothpick out from under the duvet,
my mother wakes up now, the kitchen fills up,
the whole family's there, and I'm like an observer
dropped in the wrong place,
tiny, a stranger, chilled through.

(1985)

You were drab like all those other suited
and spectacled leaders, without any special
resonance in your voice, suddenly not knowing

what to say to the huge waiting crowd. The suddenness
was what surprised you. An old man in a pince-nez,
you disappointed me,
I wasn't to know

the concrete yard where the prosecutor
probably rattled off your sentence, nor of
the coarse mark of the rope, the final humiliation.

Who could have spoken, who could tell what speech might be made
from that balcony? Opportunities once got shot of
don't come round again. Imprisonment
and death can't sharpen the edge of the lost moment

once it is nicked. What we can do is remember
the reluctant, humiliated, hesitant figure,
the man who nevertheless
soaked up the fury,
the illusion, the blind hope of the country

when the city woke
to find itself shot to pieces.

(1985)

The time when the dung-fire of hatred blazes most fiercely,
the time when pissed-on slag
smokes surreptitiously by the boiler
-the dead! the dead!
The time when people spill-stray across the street, rise up,
perceive some possibility glittering
like a stolen earring: they don't know it's theirs.
The time when you're gone, then would I gladly nibble at your breasts.

(1985)

Let's not change anything!
Should we leave them interned with carcasses from the zoo?
Yes. Why, is that not exactly what happened?
Is death by hanging kinder than being put to sleep?
I do not forget (I am not threatening anyone
in saying that: it's just the way I am:
I can't forget).
In any case what more could I want
had I been-ha ha-hanged
and returned to the spot like Pushkin's Stone Guest?
If only they would leave me alone.
I shit on reverence. They should have
exercised more piety while they were alive
(by leaving them alive). It's too late now.

There's no effective remedy for death:
no restitution for widows, for orphans,
for whole nations. I'm not interested
in the belated tears of assistant executioners.
My eyes are dry. I need them for looking.

Not that there's too much
to gaze at but everything looks sharper
this time of the evening:
a woman's body, a branch,
the light down on your face. There's
nothing I'm after. Just looking.

(1990)

I am not in Ady's vanguard of the dead, I merely bring up the rear
vaguely dawdling, treading a path that is not a road,
fearful, circumspect, like my uncle at twenty in the Easter mud
when Hungarian gendarmes escorted him to his death
on the scaffold, and one solicitously exhorted my grandmother:
Come along, my good woman, still time to say goodbye to your son.
Granny fainted away. Gellért meanwhile carefully trod round the puddles:
mire of the time would not stick to his dangling feet.
My Serbian Jewish Hungarian Communist uncle took care
of his patent-leather shoes, prizing them above anything and everything.
Should I set out down the Ulica Gellert Perlova in Subotica
I'd be lurching all over the place:
where have I come from that I should come to be here?
What is my sense of being here compared to his having been?
Truly, the dead may be more alive than the living.
Truly, Imre Nagy died so we might be honest in our time
and that's why he makes for a deadly-serious light rhyme.
Right now we are famished for honesty here,
hatred, cowardice, the most brazen hand-washing,
arse-licking, the rabbit gets to shed blood
and even the mouse fancies living flesh to chew on. We're beasts again,
and the hunters are out for us. Let it not be like this.
Remember the last photograph of him: a man as thin
as a skeleton, who even between two prison guards, given the right
to a few last words not only did not ask for mercy but questioned
the legality of the court and appealed to history,
to the workers movement,
and chose on our behalf, instead of life with dishonour
a modest, human, dignified, honourable death.

(1993)

Whoever believes in anything is an idiot.
Or colour blind to the spectrum of reality.
It's so obvious: each truth is a half-truth, a third, or a quarter?
Most likely an infinitesimally tiny decimal.
I could say this in a joky fashion
Go fuck yourself ..... But I won't say it
as I'm not in the mood for joking.
It is October the twenty-third.
For now and for ever.
I was 13 then,
happily splashing in
the medium of happening.
I lived for ten days.
Since then? Nothing.
Kádár Apró Dögei
(three ministers: Kádár's Little Puppies)
Little change.
One idiot succeeded
by another. No problem, of course,
"on the economic front", and Euro-jobbies
etc, etc.
Immeasurable now the time before me.
All "but" and "noway" and "nohow".
Not, nohow. Rotten gallows. Landscape.

I won't be turning the hourglass again.

(1991)

It is the 4th November I shall be celebrating.
That's when the system broke down. As Talleyrand
said: you can do a lot with bayonets
but you can't sit down on them.
But once there are only bayonets
with no intervening space, sitting becomes possible again,
and then, as the Slovaks say: secko jedno,
meaning the game is up.
I'm not laying wreaths, I'm not giving
interviews. I am in close personal contact
with Imre Nagy, despite the fact
that I never once met him. More's the pity.
I could have learned a lot from him.
A rich sensibility, wisdom,
and most important of all: that yes it is possible
to engage in politics and retain your honour.
The Soviet invasion did not tell us
anything substantial. It only confirmed what
we knew already, that people are generally cowards,
quite worthless. Or rather, they want to live.
And that, after all, is forgivable.

(1999)