In Budapest, Hungary 2023
Nothing prepares you for this moment in the flat fall light of late October on the quay pairs of bronze shoes some filled with dried flowers some scattered with gravel one pair, poised on the edge tongues torn laces gone men’s, women’s children tied together shot in the nape from one step from behind splashing silently they said the blue Danube ran red they said pulled under in winter cloth coats with sewn yellow stars stitched over their hearts the poet wondered what remained of thin stem wine glasses on his summer veranda those passionate adjectives and plum sauce metaphors run out of time he wrote the moon hung in the clouded sky his postcard poems come home bodily stained a miracle of resurrection almost divine from this carelessly laid pile of bodies they could they said shot the oxen and left the carts in the forest instead and just left them in their tattered soleless shoes in an Abda forest outside of Budapest. Bill Hoke -Home from Budapest November 2023
This moves me to the depths of my soul. The poem is at one with the photo…both evoking haunting images of those who inhabited , then left behind those shoes. Bill and Patty, thank you for this memorial.