Poems by Mátyás Sirokai

(Translated by Zoltán Móra)


To the Phantasmians
(extracts)


II.7.


Us who put our faith in the void and worship space shall return into his love in the end, wherever we may roam. He is the father to the mind which gazes inwardly, suspended in eternal darkness, spawning the illusion of myriad patterns and setting the swarm of celestial bodies ablaze to serve as stingers of its own glory, holding us forever mesmerized. Bulging from the surface, we crave and devour space just like its vast clusters of matter tumble into each other in mighty cycles. We turn our face towards the unexplained pulsars which drift beyond the husk of familiar constellations. Driven by celestial visions, we prowl the immortal night, fellows of distant, whirling saints, dreamers of the beginning and the end, and eternity shall be our deliverance.




III.1.


Us who were drawn onto this planet have given up chronology, forgetting what had been, not caring what will come. Time was gone; only a spiral wilderness of sprawling monasteries and rippling corridors remained, spewing forth a medley of alien sacraments. There was a murmur coming from the inner chambers, the words of an otherworldly speech, churning our viscera to the rhythm of the pulsating walls. 
Time was gone and gone was human language too. We descended into the ear canal and the planet created our replicas who came along when we emerged through the mouth. The planet taught us like a mother teaches a child. At first, she regurgitated our defective body and then she started playing with us, inflaming the urge for transformation and working with us on the humanoid, organic cathedrals which are oblivious of time and preach the perfect language to the beasts of space.




V.7.


The muscles which serve to pump darkness into the body we know as the void, for lack of a better term, shall tremble when the creases of space start to fold back into the epicenter. As the shades withdraw, the imprints shall become more visible, left behind by both the younglings, elemental particles of love, and us who are lost in the earthly light.
The imprints caught between the folding creases shall cluster as the cephalopod of the matter, proliferating around the insatiable hunger for space, grows thicker and thicker tentacles. When the head retracts its tentacles into a single tenebrous locus, around which nothing but the memory and the anticipation of planets shall revolve, then all imprints shall merge into a singular craving; and this craving shall beget the boom.

Mátyás Sirokai (1982) poet and musician, currently lives in Budapest. Sirokai graduated from Liszt Ferenc Academy of Music (Budapest) as a percussion soloist and teacher. He published three volumes of poetry. His second collection was translated to French, his third book (To the Phantasmians, 2015) won the prize of the Bookstore of Writers in Budapest. His poems were translated to English, German, Polish, Croatian, Serbian, Bulgarian and Macedonian.

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