Visit to the Home by Bettina Simon

 

VISIT TO THE HOME

by Bettina Simon

Translated by Kristen Herbert 

 

I visited my mother again.
For fifteen years I’ve been visiting
her, she used to visit me.

I love traveling, but I’m afraid
when I arrive.

Since they tore up our pictures,
we usually just walk and chat about
my work, and how things might go.

Mom shows me the way to
the cemetery where she’ll move next.
Though she’d rather I take her in
when the opportunity comes.

Then I look at my shoes,
and nod.
I think of the poems,
I wrote to her or about her,
it doesn’t matter which ones, I won’t
show her anyways.

Mom says good things, I should record them,
but I’m afraid then she’ll become quiet.
So I listen, and forget what she’s talking about.

When I visit her, sometimes
I write poems, except she is the poem,
I copy everything from her.

Like how everything falls in place
next to each other,
or splits in two, which was one.
This is my mother, who I still can’t see.

Translator

Kristen Herbert is native to the Chicago area, but spent several years in Hungary as an English teacher. She is a co-editor and founder of the bilingual Hungarian-English literary journal The Penny Truth and serves on the masthead of Hungarian Literature Online. She is a current student in fiction at the MFA in Creative Writing at University of California-Riverside.

Author

Bettina Simon was born in Miskolc, Hungary, in 1990. Her first anthology of poems Beach(Strand) received wide accolades since its publication in 2018 by the Attila József Circle. In 2019, Bettina Simon earned a Zsigmond Móricz creator’s scholarship to complete her second anthology of poems. Since 2012, she has been a regular contributor to important Hungarian literary journals, and her works can be read in Prae, Élet és irodalom, and Alföld.