Delta

 

The two arrive with two suitcases, in scruffy men’s shirts,

there’s no gender among siblings.

They stop at the rickety pier

and take the example of the tortoise. It has a house,

those without had best – whatever their role –

get building.

 

A woman’s shoulders in a scruffy men’s shirt.

She asks for a hammer, swings, and throws it in the river.

She beats the nails in with her fists, six strikes

to hammer them home. The roof truss is ready.

A tortoise sleeps on top of a stake,

its heart beats twice a day in winter.

The water, grudgingly, slack to the cold,

crawls past the stake, oversteps deposits.

 

Where does river meet sea; does it conclude

or go no further? The house is standing, the house still stands.

Its function is insulation, everything else –

the home too – is a softly ringing overtone,

misunderstanding’s purple cloak. Come thaw, come flood, submerged

in shell, the reptile is its own home.

Shirt, hammer, and blueprints can be recast.

 

 

 

Anna Zilahi is a poet and transmedia artist. Her often participatory text- and sound-based works focus on questions of society, ecology, and feminism. She graduated at the University of Applied Arts in Vienna in 2021. She is a co-founder of the Budapest-based xtro realm artist group whose work addresses non-anthropocentric and ecological strands of thought since 2017. She is editor and co-author of extrodæsia: Encyclopedia Towards a Post-Anthropocentric World (2019), a Hungarian-English bilingual dictionary that collects the vocabulary of the Anthropocene in dialogue with poetry and visual artworks. She is doing her doctoral art studies at Moholy-Nagy University of Art and Design in Budapest. Her literary works have been published in journals since 2008, her poems have been translated to English, German, French, Czech and Polish. In 2017, her first collection of poems was published with the title The Whale is not a Motif.

Owen Good is a translator from Northern Ireland of Hungarian poetry and prose. His translations include Krisztina Tóth's Pixel, and Zsolt Láng's The Birth of Emma K. (co-translated with Ottilie Mulzet). He edits at The Continental Literary Magazine and Hungarian Literature Online.

HLO HU