Thomas Land

Wheatfield by Alceda

Clarity

Do not explain or clarify

your meaning or technique.

Let the poet sit silent. Let

the poetry rise and speak.

Flight

Flippant flight on a butterfly’s wings —

life, adult life, life, life:

born from coincidence, changing, passing,

soaring above the riverbank’s grass,

shaped from the yearnings of distant childhood,

venturing over the menacing waves,

lured by the nectar of pulsing flowers,

sharing the sun with invisible stars.



The Reed

I am the reed

translating the crude,

the boundless whine,

the pleading sigh

of the wandering wind

into formal song

in praise of the wonder

of wounded nature.

Kindle the wind

and stir up the storm:

the fiercer the wind,

the finer the sound.



Like a River

Like a river, you carry me down

washing over my senses

the fort of my seven skins has abandoned

the rite of defence to the waves

unsheltered, my nerve-raw flesh in its freedom

spatters into the current

like a river, you carry me down

between singing, mountainous shores.



Epitaph

While there’s still time to sing and laugh

I shall attempt this epitaph.

He was a jester and a king,

and at his best he was much more:

a child, enjoying everything.



Thomas Ország-Land is a poet and award-winning foreign correspondent who writes from London and Budapest. His poetry has been published by The New York Times and The London Magazine, his reviews and polemics by The Baltimore Sun and The Times Literary Supplement (London). Last major work: Deathmarch: Holocaust Poems Translated from the Hungarian of Miklós Radnóti (Snakeskin, England, 2009).