Light within the Shade: Eight Hundred Years of Hungarian Poetry

Ode to the Mind

194 | Light within the Shade i s t vá n va s (19 10 – 19 9 1) Ode to the Mind The ancient greed of matter, spawning, slaughtering, —Silent, ancestral—and the tyrant-hearted zeal Enkindled by the putrid scum accumulating Within the earth’s entrails since time’s beginning Behold the flogging forces of this world that rule The puerile fluffy folly of engendering, Pretend to leap, dance, caper in a prancing reel. Among them, though, is heard a new uneasy voice That feigns as if its pupil spirit were of old, The youngest force that ever blazed into the world, That hides behind a glass its lovely gleaming eyes, And steps with care in the false beard of its disguise, Wears a grey suit—the beasts would tear it uncontrolled Did they its secret fragile weakness realize. O mind, young mind, a mere half-million years of age: That you might come to be, the mammals grew the brain! Reasons now, arguments, bite at our cells’ dumb cage: Existence’s great, stubborn, docile revolution. You, no amoeba guessed at, nor did any stone; Without you would have failed all birth and generation When the long ice ages ravaged the Pliocene. After the havoc, through a crack that nature cut, Quietly you stepped in. The moon, the earth, the sea Groaned in their labor pains. On two feet Man stood out Among the dying ancient beasts. And since that day Your voice was always audible, and patiently Never falls silent till it finds a hearer; but Grotesque beliefs, insulted instincts ossify. ist vá n va s | 195 You are the anxious teenage fever-fit of being, The lightning bolt that slashes deep into the core; Your scissors cut the track for nature’s growth and freeing, Releasing her most hidden, rare, and lovely flower. Not what’s eternal, not what’s fugitive and fleeing, Only what it can be, become, what’s in its power: Rambling wild mind, to me you’re faith itself undying. I praise you in the jail, in war I praise your name, Remember you among the lies, in deep earth chill; With a split consciousness, and fallen into shame, Stuttering, mindless, compromised, I bless you still, And when in void dances the liberated soul, I’ll seek you in the light beyond the night, nor claim Nor even need a God unless through your own will. As, after mating, pleasure’s drug and opiate Exchanges to the forms of purifying consciousness: In the wild underworld, through the huge night’s distress, Upon that perilous path don’t leave me desolate. Above the grave-pits, under the unending stars, You, the undreamed-of link, that mad connectedness, The most courageous passion of our human state! 1947 ...