I know not what to strangers this dear landscape might mean,
to me it is my birhplace, this tiny spot of green;
ringed now with fire, it was, once, my childhood rocking me;
I grew there as a fragile branch from the parent tree;
O may my body sink bac to that life-giving soil.
This land is home to me: for if a bush should kneel
before my feet I know its name just as it’s flower,
I know who walks the road, whither and at what hour,
I know what it might mean if reddening pain should fall
dripping some summer dusk down the lintel or the wall.
[u]For him who flies above it, a map is all he sees,
this living scape of being but symbols and degrees;
the reader of the maplines has neither known nor felt
the place where the great Mihály Vörösmarty dwelt;[/u]
what’s hidden in the map? yes, barracks, mills and arms,
but for me crickets, oxen, steeples, quiet farms;
with field-glasses he marks the crops and industries,
but I, the trembling labourer, the forest trees,
the twittering orchards, vineprops with their tended grapes,
and the old granny in the graveyard where she weeps;
and what is targeted as rail or factory
is just a lineman by his signal-box to me,
and children watch him wave his red flag for the guard,
and sheepdogs roll and tumble in the foundry yard;
and in the park the trace of loves who once loved me,
the honey taste of kisses sweet as bilberry,
and on the way to school you’d not step on a crack,
let you’d forget your lesson or break your mother’s back;
the pilot cannot see that paving-stone, that grass:
to see all this there is no instrument or glass.
For we are guilty too, as others are,
we know how we have siined, in what, and when and where:
but working people live here, poets in innocence,
breast-feeding infants with their dawned intelligence,
and one day it will brighten, hid now in safety’s bark,
till peace shall write upon our land its shining mark
and answer our choked words in sentences of light.
With great wings cover us, O guardian cloud of night.