The Invisible Bridge

For the Zahav brothers

O tempora! O mores! O mekkora nagy córesz.

O the times! O the customs! O what tremendous tsuris.

– from Marsh Marigold,

a Hungarian Labor Service newspaper,

Bánhida Labor Camp, 1939

From Bulgaria thick wild cannon pounding rolls,

It strikes the mountain ridge, then hesitates and falls.

A piled-up blockage of thoughts, animals, carts, and men;

whinnying, the road rears up; the sky runs with its mane.

In this chaos of movement you’re in me, permanent,

deep in my consciousness you shine, motion forever spent

and mute, like an angel awed by death’s great carnival,

or an insect in rotted tree pith, staging its funeral.

– Miklós Radnóti, from “Picture Postcards,”

written to his wife during his death march from Heidenau, 1944

It is

as though I lay

under a low

sky and breathed

through a needle’s eye.

– W. G. Sebald

from Unrecounted