David Wojahn

[from Interrogation Palace: New and Selected Poems 1982 - 2004
by David Wojahn]

Radnóti in a Trench Coat

The lyric will be worked to death, on a work detail.
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Worked until it’s trochees & ellipses for the State.
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Worked to its Natural State, which is a trench coat filled with entrails.
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Its grave could fill a soccer stadium. (Now hit delete.)
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70,000 punctuation marks, virgules & a singing corpse, fortunate
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to sing inside a trench coat in the Balkan snow.
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Inside the pockets of the trench coat (now hit
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enter), words that speak Hungarian, aligned in rows
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like galley-slave oars. Row Row Row your trireme
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to Actium to burn & sink. The lyric works until it drowns.
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(Press undo & the program crashes.) The lyric’s brain
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accommodates the bullet unsuccessfully. It comes
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out the forehead & is lodged inside a tree. (Now press
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exit, now press close.) Now the shovel & the black earth.


Note: Hungarian poet Miklós Radnóti (1909-1944), a victim of the Holocaust. His final poems were found in the pocket of his overcoat after his body had been exhumed from a mass grave.