Átutazóként
Like someone rudely woken on a winter
morning on a bench at the station, under
a glass roof soaked through by the bloody sun,
who sits up stiffly in the freezing, un-
swept hall, looks round and finds it all too loud,
and can't see what he's doing in the crowd,
or what brought him to this unfamiliar
terminal in the provinces (who are
these people, where have they all sprung from? why
this shoving others aside, this rushing by?)
then a sprinkling of semi-conscious drunks
spills from the doorways, bums with penknives, ranks
of fur-coated babushkas, loiterers,
soldiers on leave, newsboys, wheeltappers, porters,
sad office workers with worn leather cases,
kids selling towels, gypsies with brown faces
and bundles, skiving students, a lunatic
with empty paper bags whose party trick
is bursting them, some tired security toughs
with bullet proof jackets and Kalashnikovs,
unshaven old tramps and an under age
mother, her child screeching into her ribcage,
streetwalkers, cops, street preachers afloat
on rhetoric... from what vast womb or throat
have all these people issued, and why do they
rush blindly at commands from the PA,
why this swarming, what train is it they want,
why do they labour and look so hesitant,
of all this he knows nothing, but watches amazed
as dawn drips blood-grey through that distant glazed
roof and he cannot now remember whether
it was some curse or mission swept him hither,
or where he comes from, nor can he begin
to guess the past his home is swimming in
like someone rudely woken on a winter
morning on a bench at the station under
a glass roof, so was I born, so cold the air,
so hard the wooden bench, not knowing where
and why, not even now, what deadly crime
I have been exiled for, how long the time
till death or pardon come, His will be done
and God decide, so that I may move on.
Translated by George Szirtes