Images of the 1956 Hungarian revolution
Instead of a Tombstone
He shyly closed the lids of darkened eyes,
a small red flower blossomed on his breast.
A smile still lingered on his mouth’s surprise
as if at home he slept and loved his rest…
The little hero in the filth is laid
(around him fall his bread-loaves in the mud)
just as but now he paced the barricade –
in vain let fall his bomb, and shed his blood…
He shyly closed the lids of darkened eyes,
a small red flower blossomed on his breast.
Beside his corpse a steaming gutter lies.
The world sings victory, but signs a jest.
Thomas Ország-Land’s next book will be THE SURVIVORS: Holocaust Poetry for Our Time, to be published by Smokestack Press, England, in 2014.
Note: This poem was translated from the Hungarian & Edited by Watson Kirkconnell
The Author of this poem is an award-winning foreign correspondent who gained his first experience in war reporting on the streets of his native Budapest during the anti-Soviet revolution of October/November, 1956. The poem was first published by the revolutionary newspaper The Hungarian Independent that employed him as a cab reporter. It is still performed from time to time at celebrations marking the doomed revolution, and it has been just published in an anthology – Magyar ünnepepek, Közlönty & Lapkiadó, Budapest, 2013 – intended mostly for school children. The present translation is by the late-great Watson Kirkconnell, doyen of translators of Hungarian literature into English, who was president of Acadia University in Nova Scotia, Canada, when Ország-Land read philosophy there in the years following the revolution.