Light within the Shade: Eight Hundred Years of Hungarian Poetry

Night in the Outskirts

152 | Light within the Shade Night in the Outskirts From loading-yards like deep sea caves the light now lifts its sagging net, our kitchen’s drowned beneath the waves, sunk in a dusk still darker yet. Silence,—a scrub-brush almost goes languidly to its feet, to crawl; a bit of brick wall dimly knows that it must either stand or fall. Tattered, oil-soaked, now the evening sighs in the sky and quits, at the town’s edge exhausted sits; across the square it staggers, yawning, then lights a bit of moon for burning. Like ruins of the dusk they rise, factories, but still, of deeper darkness yet they are the mill, foundations of silence. And through their windows flies in sheaves the moonlight’s frieze, its mysteries: out of whose woof each ribbed loom weaves till dawn, when workaday resumes, somberly out of gloom and gleams the sleeping mill-girls’ tumbled dreams. A vaulted graveyard looms beyond: lime kiln, iron mill, screw mill, silent. Family crypts whose echoes’ fiction guards a secret resurrection: closely whispered mysteries. at t i l a józ se f | 153 A cat investigates the fence, a watchman, superstitious, sees a sudden flash, will-o’-the-wisp that glows and blinks and vanishes,— the beetle-bodied dynamos shine cool, obscure, immense. Train whistle. Dew infiltrates the dusk, and sleeves a fallen linden’s greying leaves: dust in the roadway clogs as it cleaves. A muttering worker, cop upon his beat. Comrade, with leaflets, cuts across the street. Just as a dog sniffs and follows what’s before him, as a cat turns back and hearkens, circling streetlights, where it darkens. The inn’s mouth spews out light that’s rotten, its windows vomit pools of ache; inside, the choked lamp swings forgotten, a laborer keeps a lonely wake. The barman wheezes in his doze; the drunk grins at the wall’s illusion, reels on the lewd stairs, overflows, weeps. And cheers the revolution. The clapping water sets and chills like smeltings in the mills. The wind moves like a dog astray, its great tongue touches, loose and splay, the waters; drinks and swills. Hay-mattresses like rafts swim mute upon the serried waves of dark— 154 | Light within the Shade The warehouse is a shipwrecked bark, the foundry’s an iron barge: behold the foundryman dreams through the mold a scarlet babe of molten gold. All’s thick with dew, all’s heaviness. The mildew traces out the maps of all the lands of wretchedness. The barren fields of tattered grass yield only rags and paper scraps. They’d crawl if but they could. They stir, too feeble to do more. In whose image the soiled laundry flaps, blown by your moist and clinging air, O Night! as ragged sheets hung out to dry on life’s worn clothesline of the sky, O Grief, O Night! Night of the poor! become my coal, smoke hotly here upon my soul, melt from my heart its steel, make it the standing anvil that won’t split, the hammer’s twang and glit colliding,— in victory the forged blade gliding, O Night! I sleep, brothers, that I might be fresh. The night is heavy, somber, whole. Let not the worm devour our flesh. Let not affliction crush our soul. 1932 ...