for Miklós Radnóti
Fall 1944: I, an infant
crawling on the warm floor in Little Rock,
know nothing of you—shot dead near Abda,
six hundred strides from the Raba. Hemlocks,
huddled bareboned, hide the clumsy mass grave
your fellow Hungarians will find two
years later. In the pocket of your slave-
camp jacket, a palm-sized notebook soaked through
with blood, urine and fertile loam. Poems
somehow survive, taut script of visual
postcards describing your final days: Grim,
dark-rubied visions of your wife, fearful
peasants smoking pipes, captives pissing blood,
Lorsi shot dead, and you soon, in the woods.
*Picture postcards in Serbo-Croatian
Roger Armbrust
September 14, 2003
