Light within the Shade: Eight Hundred Years of Hungarian Poetry

From the Cycle of Mourning

204 | Light within the Shade z s u z s a b e n e y (19 3 0 – 2 0 0 6 ) From the Cycle of Mourning I can’t bear that your dying doesn’t hurt me. You aren’t with me, but you haven’t gone. I who basked in the warm glow of your dwelling swim now in winter’s frozen clouds alone. Then was it better when I fell through tearing briars into our unveiled future, its bite of flaming horror, than to wander on this soft shore where neither day nor night are able to dissolve this crystal greyness— mirroring how you are not, but you are? here, under the sky’s vault, unruffled nothing; perhaps those cold flakes melt to tears up there. To lie down by you then would have been better— to feel, upon the shivering flesh of me, your unmoved corpse, than this, this beating on my mouth, this thick-sweet insanity. Published 2008 ...