The Women of China

Once a crowd of beautiful ladies descended
to the waterfront in Xian and Du Fu saw them.
It was the third day of the third month, the time
of the Lustration Festival. In those days
the ancient capital of China was still called Chang-an,
the city of Perpetual Peace, and Du Fu was a famous poet
during the reign of the Tang Dynasty.

However, he disliked the wasteful luxury of the women
he saw at the waterfront and the depravity
in which they were immersed.
These beauties, he said, were as flamboyant and arrogant
as gentle and elegant. The skin on their marvelous bodies
was delicate and jade pendants framed their temples.
They wore exorbitant gowns made of silk,
embroidered with gold peacocks and silver unicorns.

But the women that I saw in China thirteen centuries later
were very different. I saw them working hard on the fields
and in factories. Simply dressed, they walked

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poem by Paul Hartal
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The Divorce of the Moon

The day arrived
And the engineers came.
They turned on the new lamps.
These cutting- edge outdoor lanterns
Glared with enormously powerful lights,
Flooding the whole blue planet
With shining effulgence.

The lights were very radiant.
They shone
With such brilliant incandescence
That the night completely disappeared
From the Earth.

The Moon became very pale then
And felt she was not needed anymore.
Betrayed and heavy hearted
She decided to abandon the Earth.

And so in the small hours of a Friday

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poem by Paul Hartal
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Medals

An enormous explosion threw the boy out of his bed.
He woke up on the carpeted floor, wiping out with his left hand
the crumbs of an interrupted dream. The room shook up as
another bomb detonated nearby with ear-piercing noise.
Shimmering red patches of light flared up in the dark ink
of the night.

Mother rushed into the room panic-stricken taking him down
in a hurry to the bomb shelter. This was merely a basement
shared with other people during the bomb raids.

When the sirens sounded the all clear sign it was already
morning. In the apartment the latched doors had burst off
their hinges. The window glasses shattered into a variety
of splinters and the striped curtain in the living room
became a colony of ribbons.

Looking out of the windowless room he saw long tongues
of flames shooting up from an incendiary bomb that fell on
the pavement. And then starting with a strange swishing

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poem by Paul Hartal
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Dove of Peace

Peace is more than
the absence of war,
enveloped in the ovum
of a tranquil repose.

Peace is more than
the phoenix rising
from the ruins
of Stalingrad and Berlin.

Peace is more than
the terrible silence
of the ashes of Hiroshima
and Auschwitz.

For, real peace rests
in all nations just,
in accord and friendship,
mutual respect and trust.

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Medical Statistics

A wild snowstorm was raging in the city.
It was dark and the streets were deserted.
A savage wind hooted and shook the trees.
It blew the snow into her eyes.

Bundled up in winter clothes
Penny sped up the pace of her steps,
Hurrying to reach the safety of home.
The long ribbon of her red scarf
Flew and flopped in the roaring gale.

The roads were slippery and treacherous.
At a wrong step she stumbled and fell.
She landed with her outstretched hands
On the concrete sidewalk,
Hitting hard the icy surface.

In the hospital an orthopedic surgeon
Examined the x-rays. He diagnosed
A distal radius and ulna fracture

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The Exercise

One day in the lager
I saw a young and arrogant SS officer.
I was then a prisoner near Vienna,
In Strasshof an der Nordbahn,
Strasshof on the Northern Railway
In Southern Austria.

This haughty Schutstaffel (SS) man
Was dressed in a spiffy black uniform.
Under the eagled swastika symbol,
The insigne of the cross-boned skull,
Emblazed on his visor cap,
Stared menacingly at the world.
He wore his hat at a rakish angle
And in his right hand
He brandished a stick.

Like a conductor of an orchestra
He wielded the baton,
Entertaining himself jollily,

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Fate Hanged on a Hairbreadth

It was summer,1944.
The train stood at the railway station of Gyŏr,
halfway on the road
between Budapest and Vienna.

In the boxcars
there were over 3,000 passengers.
The Hungarian gendarmes squeezed
the deported men, women and children
like sardines into the wagons
and the prisoners were crying for help.

For the SS-Unterscharführer
assigned to the transport
it was just another job.
The corporal already directed
many similar trains to the east.
And those trains always went to the east
and to the same terminus.

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poem by Paul Hartal
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The Illusion of Gravity

Gravity is an illusion, says the Scientific American
in its issue of November 2005.

Well, then how come that I cannot fly like a bird?

Oh no, smiles Professor Juan Maldacena.
Gravity, he explains, is one of the dimensions of space,
and it might be a holographic phenomenon
caused by the interactions of quantum particles
and fields in a lower-dimensional domain.

It sounds good, professor, but are we closer now to
the understanding of reality than we were last October?
As you know, Newton thought that gravitation
was the attractive force between masses of matter
but Einstein concluded that it resulted from
the warping of space and time by objects that follow
the geometrical curvature of the cosmos.

Now let us change a bit the topic and talk about

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poem by Paul Hartal
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Travel in a Box Car of the Fuehrer

Armed with bayonet-fixed rifles
And hurling vulgar insults
Royal Hungarian gendarmes
In cock- feather- plumed hats
Shoved us with vicious force
Onto a shabby cattle car
In the railway station of Szeged.

And then they locked the doors.

With my little sister in her arms
Mother and I found ourselves
Amid eighty men, women and children
Squeezed together like sardines
In a hermetically sealed tin can.
The wagon was ill-ventilated
Its small windows were barred and wired.

The Jewish prisoner train
Departed slowly with the deported

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When is a Painting Finished?

I paint.
On my easel
pictures in oil and acrylic grow
like stalagmites in limestone caves.

I think that painting is a magical act
that transforms invisible thoughts
and feelings into visible colors
and forms.

But I never can tell
when is the work finished.
After all it is always possible
to change a line, a hue, or a color
or even the whole composition.

Painters have different opinions
about this.

Some say that when the artist

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poem by Paul Hartal
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