Somebody Consoles Me With a Poem

Sa'ndor Csoo'ri

translated from the Hungarian by Len Roberts and Ldszlo' Ve'rtes

Can you hear it? Somebody's reading a poem to me over the telephone,

he's consoling me for my dead,

for myself,

he's promising a snowfall on my forehead.

snow on our common resting place:

on a bed, forests, beyond the skeletons of yesterday's flowers,

and healing silence in a gentle cellar,

where plum-tree logs

will burn, blazing

there will be wine on the table,

onion

and bread,

otherworldly light gleaming from a sharp knife,

and on the timeless, white cellar wall

an ant, separate from its army,

marches toward future centuries.

Can you hear it? What he says, he says to you as well:

don't flap into the night,

into mourning, into soot,

you're not a angel, nor a condor,

you're a sweet country's sole dweller [...]

From This Art, Poems about Poetry, pg. 83,

edited by Michael Wiegers,

Copper Canyon Press, 2003