The Boy Changed Into A Stag Cries Out At The Gates Of Dawn
This poem is my humble tribute to the magnificent, vastly superior poem 'The Boy Changed Into A Stag Cries Out At The Gates Of Secrets' by the Hungarian Ferenc Juhasz and translated by Ted Hughes in the first edition of Modern Poetry in Translation in 1965.
I tread so softly
I hardly make
A sound
In your garden
In silver dawn
Tipped with iridescence
Among the sleeping forms
I remember running from
The voices braying
An abundance of misery
Among dead leaves
And dirty hands peeking
Through sticks
And the pain the
Pain of my undoing
Screaming out to
My mother the moon
Caught in black nets
In ancient dark
I still heard them
In the swirl
Of electrons
The ground bones
Of revolutions
Woodlice crawling
On buried altars
And dead oceans
Wrinkled by monsters
My voice lost
My spine frozen
My fingers fused
Skin sweating felt
The world turning
Grey and timorous
With perpetual danger
So I ran again
I ran for hours
Till I stood
On a hill
Snorting and stamping
No name no memory
And the stars
In my antlers
All dead.
Pause now there now
She told me
It’s over and
You’re changed now
Go back and
Have no fear
Stand among them
Smell sweet clover
And whuff hot breath
On the empty shapes
And colours whose names
Have gone.
