Survival in Sodom by Magda Székely

(March 2014)

The author of the following pieces is hardly known abroad, yet she is one of the greatest among the Holocaust writers. Magda Székely (1936-2007),  poet, translator, literary editor, was a shy and very private person with relatively little published output. More of her work will appear in Survivors, an anthology of Hungarian Holocaust poetry in Thomas Ország-Land’s English translation, to be released by Smokestack Books (England) in June.

 

 

 

 

1

Saving the Sodomites

 

I hold a solitary vigil

over this forsaken garden

of bones. The skulls have called my name.

It is my lot to guard them.

 

He answered, and the ossified,

dead flesh began to grow again.

Behold, the hecatombs revived.

 

I do not possess the power

to grow live flesh upon dead bone.

This time, though, I call the questions.

 

 

over swiftly passing time?

Can you exercise forgiveness

if all deny the crime?

 

The fragile stalk of trust can feed

to seek ten righteous Sodomites

 

 

2

The Sentence

 

as stones are weighing down the earth.

 

But spring is bright. I eat, and I have grown.

My living flesh would reach towards the living.

 

yet must remain as resolutely faithful

and strain as unflinching as the dead are dead.

I must remain, like stones upon the earth,

unshaken in our righteousness.

 

Earth slowly heals the void left by their lives.

Their moaning spaces fill with new arrivals.

Their footprints disappear. My own survival

alone remains the last indictment.

 

 

 

3

Precipice

 

A human being consuming

a hearty lunch, or observing

in comfort from the kerbside

during their faltering march,

isolated, deserted,

herded in hatred towards

 

 

 

how could such a person tell

upon what appalling shores,

and over what gaping abyss

I guard against missing a step

and what tenacious powers

tie me still to this place,

and what is the weight I must

carry in isolation?

 

in truth, alone in my arms,

and if no-one prevents my fall

and if my strength should fail

and the final crumb of compassion

if no-one comes to my aid,

the abyss will swallow us all.

 

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