We are all Saturn’s seed:
Convulsive flesh, guts filled with filth and light;
He’d laid on us our sufferings like salt and spicy weeds
And eats us now and gasps with every bite.
Life is too short, he doesn’t need a pot,
He doesn’t care for flavour, juiciness;
We’re hardly born, he grabs us, and he rips out all we’ve got
And then devours the uncooked gory mess.
Where is that clock-faced frying pan today,
The eggs that he was frying there of yore,
The sundisk-yolk, the moonface-white, and Time sizzling away?
Inside his bowels now and evermore
We are all Saturn’s seed. We must
Accept our father is now old. Insatiable greed
Is all that moves him: gasps of pain and lust
Locked in the magic of ‘to eat, to breed.’
Translated by Peter Zollman
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From Selected Poems by István Baka