Light within the Shade: Eight Hundred Years of Hungarian Poetry

On the Fields of July

128 | Light within the Shade On the Fields of July Monumentality. Blue—blue—blue. Geometrical fields, worlds-edge topaz yellow. Wind. Heat. Earthsmell. The sun trickles, Gold planes flinging back the scarlet sun. On these fattened and capacious fields, Arch out now your parched and withered arms, my brothers, my sisters, and in these yellow meadowlands behold the peasant-folk (thigh-deep in the ripe wheatfield) as they surge onward with a vigorous sculptural swing, (and half-nude) their hundredfold gesture wiping clear the endless stretch of the fields. Long johns, half-nude bodies. All in arms, all ready to attack. Swish. As if the whole thing were a precise complex mechanical system, through . . . and through the perspectival blue. But still: (pay attention) see the reapers’ beautiful solid heads fairly blazing out with the fresh healthy brain-marrow, their teeth are masterpieces cut from holystone and their calves and feet, columnar, cinnamon-brown, root themselves at their pleasure in the black soil. Let your eyes now drink in a billion tints and colors. But of all of them the bread’s yellow seed is the most powerful, cut down and sheaved and tossed in crossed-stacked orderly ricks to the song of the peasants that their granaries should fill and into your cologned, decrepit bodies a new outrageous life should spring. l ajos k a ssá k | 129 Wave, wave on the spacious yellow fattened land flaglike your mad new-fashioned revolutionary tam-o’-shanters, O brothers! 1918 ...