“We saw Truth rising in the morning and dying by night.”

I walk fast while the rain is falling,
The air is numb and streaked with fog,
Past me run men and boys in gangs
With submachine guns in their hands.
A woman sits on the boulevard curbstone
Her eyes are open with unspeaking pain,
Her dead son lies under brown wrapping-paper,
The blood is mingling with the rain.

A tank breaks out from the foggy evening
Its cannon flares in the slow-falling day,
Three frowsy heads of three brownish striplings—
A scene from a poor little revolution-play—
Appear. They heave some jar across the pavement.
Grim spectator-wishes rise in a flood,
A miracle: the tank’s aflood, afire!
The rain is mingling with the blood.

Now the living feel the dead who are calling:
“You’re cursed with this fight for the sake of us both,”
The clothes of the living are ragged, bloody, muddy,
The face of the dead wears an unspeakable oath:
“To fall in this free fight is a deed, not fate,
It means that you really have not lived in vain,
See how easy it is to set tanks afire!”
The blood is mingling with the rain.

The rain is mingling with the blood now,
With mine, with yours, with ours, with theirs,
A silent and everlasting curse
Strikes the man who no longer dares.
There is a feeling of bitter self-damnation,
We need no public laurel, no future cross,
On the pavement bloom ten red blood-roses.
Under the gutter the untroubled sod,
The rain is mingling with the blood.

(Translated from the Hungarian by J. A. Lukacs)

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