Light within the Shade: Eight Hundred Years of Hungarian Poetry

Between Fall and Spring

102 | Light within the Shade Between Fall and Spring Now autumn’s wine-song echoes and is still. Stifling and close the cellar’s summer chill. Now wind and water beat the naked vine. Now gooseflesh pocks the clay-hill’s pallid skin, the earth is rotten, melts itself to mud, as does the naked body of the dead. It’s evening, and the evenings of this season hurry like thievish age in silent treason: old age that creeps on tiptoe hour by hour, then leaps, and suddenly we’re in its power! We can deceive ourselves no more; we cry O grief that we must die, that we must die! Fresh snow has fallen on the wretched soil, as if its ugliness cried for a veil. As is a new-made bed, the ground is white, prepared for us and waiting for the night, downy, soft, pillowed, immaculate: and just like children who have stayed up late, we mischievously walk upon our bed— children who won’t be tucked beneath the spread and swaying balance on the coverlet until their loving mother tires of it and calls to them, “Get under now, bye-bye!” O grief that we must die, that we must die! The year like an hourglass turns, replaced, the yore one’s spent, the new shrinks through its waist; and as the glass’s used-up sand pours through, the old year leaves its troubles to the new. For so much work remains undone, unsaid! And pleasure’s tree is yet unharvested . . . m i h á ly ba bi t s | 103 Our heart, impatient sentry, loathes delay; it hastes its beat, relief is on the way. A hundred drawers we open, nervously. A farewell-tasting kiss thrills curiously. Old joys cannot console, we gasp a sigh: O grief that we must die, that we must die! The snow is melting, spring waits eagerly. What do I know, what do I want to be! I am a feather, melting with the snow, that sighs to tears and melts into a flow. And when the birds return, the earth is sere, and winter’s name has passed on like the year. Only my winter’s not so quick to fly. Only my death cannot contrive to die. Whomever in my life I would set free, that bird would never yet return to me. My fallen leaves will not revivify: O grief that we must die, that we must die! So one by one my friends have left my side. By those I helped I later was denied. Those whom I loved in turn do not love me, those whom I glittered for would bury me. Whatever word my branch wrote in the dust is swept away by spring mud and is lost. The wine, last year’s spent guest, dries uselessly, to me even the spring’s an enemy! Only you cover me, womanly good, as roses do the trellis’ broken wood, kissing my frightened eyes with lullaby . . . O grief that we must die, that we must die! 1935 ...