Poeta Doctus

One of the editors here at Poeta Doctus is synchronicity. And, after all, what poetic sensibility isn’t tuned to the rime of meaningful coincidence?

To wit: a friend recently shared a photo from a small town near where he presently lives in Hungary, Celldömölk. Now, it so happens I visited Celldömölk in 1991 to honour the publication of a friend’s avant garde epic work Fehérlófia (the son of the white horse). In the upper right hand corner of the picture, you can see directions to the nearby vulkán, the extinct volcano Mount Ság (Sághegy).

Among other claims to fame, Sághegy is where the epic’s author, Kemenes Géfin László, hid out after participating in the Hungarian Revolution in 1956, before he was able to flee to Austria and eventually to Montreal, Canada, where I was fortunate enough to make his acquaintance. Returning to his home town and the flanks of Sághegy thirty-five years later, Géfin was struck by the lushness of the locale, so much he was moved to remark, “There is a god here!”

To honour the occasion, I sat and furiously composed some forty different iterations (I still have the small, black notebook) of what eventually became the second Budapest Suite. To honour this most recent synchronicity I reproduce Budapest Suites II, below, and share a reading of the poem.

Budapest Suites II

for Laszlo Géfin

 

“There is a god here!”

In wild strawberry entangling thistles,

In maple saplings, a shroud on loam,

In chestnut and cherry blossoms over tree-line,

In goldenrod and grass, every green stalk, bowed with seed.

 

And there is a god who

Quarries slate for imperial highways,

Mines iron-ore out of greed,

Who would have Mount Ság again

Ash and rock.

 

And there is a god

In the seared, scarred, spent, still,

For lichen, poppies and song

Here rise from the bared

And broken rock to the air!