Mary Magdalene
Lord, I have waited two thousand years for you.
If I undid my hair now, it would reach down to the bottom of hell.
Oh dear, if Satan took it for a bell-rope and gave it a pull one day.
Such great pains would ring in me, my sound would drive out
the dead from the ground, the buried silver pieces,
like the mist of the stars, would spatter into Space.
Crack me instead, crack your black-skirted bell, oh Lord!
For the heart of the earth will crack, when I begin to ring.
But you do not hear my voice, your countenance
is turned away from me, like a flipped coin showing tails,
whose embossing is indecipherable – faint, as the full moon
is faint in the vapours of the dawn...
I await you on the threshold of your temple, Lord, and each dawn
of my two thousand years is oozing with the red of your five wounds.
Translated by Peter Zollman
From 'Selected Poems' by István Baka