Light within the Shade: Eight Hundred Years of Hungarian Poetry

Saint Blaise-ing*

104 | Light within the Shade Saint Blaise-ing* Graciously intercede for me, help me, Saint Blaise! In my childhood two white candles were laid on my frail neck in the form of a cross and I peered between the candles as a frightened deer watches between two branches. Midwinter, on Blaise’s name-day my eye hung bemused and blinking on the old priest, who offered up a prayer to you, bending above me as I knelt at the altar according to the gentle custom, and mumbling in Latin, which neither he nor I well understood. In spite of this you listened to him and stood guard on my childish life-breath against the throttling grippe, the lizard, the flaming pit of the uvula, all so that when I had grown up I’d live ungratefully for half a century without giving you the least thought. Oh, don’t mind my ugly thoughtlessness, protect me now too, bishop of Sebasta! That’s how we live, you see, foolishly, childishly; we run away and don’t look back on the world’s buzzing highroad, let go of your hands —you higher spirits!—but you just smile and indulge our folly like clever adults Not hurt when we disregard you and then we run back to you in our necessity as I do now before you, with this trembling heart . . . smile at me now, blessed Saint Blaise! who like a whimpering urchin kneel here on the naïve stone of your simple altar— smile at my folly, but just help! For this cruel traitor, the crab, is just killing me, m i h á ly ba bi t s | 105 it’s got a choke-hold on my throat, my windpipe’s crushed, my wind is getting short, my lungs gasp for their air, as a climber crawls up a mountain under a heavy burden, all out of breath, that’s how I live, panting and panting always. And the doctors’ knives are readying now to cut my bad neck, which once I so willingly bent to you between the cross of your candles as if I had already foreknown it . . . Help, Blaise! Because your saintly larynx too was cut apart by knives, when the evil pagan put you to death: you know it all! You know the sharpness of the blade, the taste of blood, the long tensedness of the minutes, the cramps of the torn windpipe, and the struggle of choking, and above all the dread. Help! You’ve been through everything, you’re over it all, clever grown-up! You know it well, just how much suffering humankind can bear, how much God’s goodness, even, finds too much, and how much life is worth . . . and know this too, perhaps; that death is not so big a thing. June 1937 *St. Blaise is the patron saint of cancer victims. The peculiar word-construction of the title is Babits’s own. ...