Gyula Illyés

Ebb Tide


In the marketplace, no children.
In the side streets, the aged...

The whole village,
like a blimp, has been airborne.

Ten meters above the ground
incorporeally hover
the school, the parish house,
the old bullock-browed church.

The meat market flew off a year ago.
The veterinarian's home is also airborne.

The cemetery, grappling with the infinite,
eating the shoreline from time out of mind,
silently marches off
with its ever scarcer furrows of surf
lit by the moon, leaving behind
a hodepodge
of bones and barge wreckage.

trns. by Bruce Berlind


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