Writer of Poetry, Screen Plays, Stage Plays & Fiction
Writer of Poetry, Screen Plays, Stage Plays & Fiction
On one of the corners of St Stephen’s square
is a café, the California
Coffee Company, with cheery slogans,
in English, extolling the benefits
of the bean. A window seat gives a view,
across the square, of the west entrance
to the basilica of Szent Istvan,
its portico embossed in gold with
‘Ego Sum Veritas et Vita’.
Our backs to the basilica we walk
down Zyrini Street towards the Danube,
Buda rising high on its western slopes.
There is a young woman with a wooden hoop
almost as big as herself – and a small dog
not much bigger than her head – who performs
circus tricks, where Terez Boulevard meets
Andrassy Avenue – named for an Empress
and a Count before old Europe fell apart.
As the three lanes idle at red and the dog
waits on the kerb the girl and the hoop
become an astrolabe, a gyroscope
within the interstices of traffic lights.
When she stills and bows to the varied windscreens
the dog leaps to her shoulder and together –
With her new camera, a Christmas present,
and with the intuitive surety,
at not quite nine, of how to make a picture,
she makes a sunlit panorama of Pest
from the Fisherman’s Bastion in Buda –
a Magyar edifice of walls and towers
built in the nineteen hundreds to celebrate
the permanence of the Habsburg Empire.
In a wall’s shadow she shows me the screen,
and what she has angled by chance. I note
the parliament building, the Great Synagogue,
Formerly Buda’s town hall, courthouse, prison
and school, newly refurbished throughout
and re-named The House of Wisdom, it is now
bookshop, café, bistro, conference centre
and an esoteric museum –
in an eclectic city of museums
ranging from Marzipan through to Murder.
The refurbishment finally repaired
all the damage done by stray Red Army
artillery shells, and uncovered stonework –
exhibited behind glass now – not seen
since the Ottoman Empire ruled Hungary.
Eschewing the conundrum of hailing a cab –
On a snowy January Saturday
we were delayed for six hours or so
at Ferenc Liszt airport, Budapest.
Except for the purchase of a Pick sausage
and a small box of Gerbeaud chocolates
in Heinemann Travel Value/Duty Free
we spent our time in the Leroy Bistro
with its international fast food cuisine
from nigiri sushi to Wiener Schnitzel.
From my seat in the bistro I could see
continually an advert, a fifteen
by forty feet video with,
‘O what fine thought we had because we thought
That the worst rogues and rascals had died out.’
NINETEEN HUNDRED AND NINETEEN, W.B. Yeats
Where the four main thoroughfares of our erstwhile
Roman city meet, a many-legged dragon,
in vivid gold and red, curved and reared, to gongs,
drums, fire crackers on a February day.
Dancers whirled long white ribbons, a whorl
of streamers like a wild, wispy sky.
This was the year of the omnivorous Pig,
ALWAYS WITH YOU
INTERSECTIONS
NEW YEAR, BUDAPEST
NEW YEAR, BUDAPEST
THE VIEW FROM THE BASTION