Click in the field, then press CTRL+C to copy the HTML code
<div style="background:#fff;border:#bbb dashed 1px;padding:5px"><a href="http://en.citatepedia.ro/comments.php?id=429663" style="color:#000;text-decoration:none"><div style="margin:10px 0"><strong>The Shadow of God</strong></div><div style="margin:10px 0">To Mohács<br>in the marshlands, still in the pouring rain,<br>August 29th, 1526, where those summoned <br>and hastily gathered died in thousands<br>in the space of a moment the chronicler<br>scribbles, in the safety of distance,<br>cruel panthers in a moment to hell's pit.<br>That day the guns chained wheel to wheel,<br>smoke and the cries of men and horses,<br>the knights shot from their saddles, armour<br>dragging them into the mire, the hooves<br>stamping them in, the infantry butchered,<br>in the space of a moment the swift<br>routine of retreat, slaughter and rout,<br>the space of a moment. No prisoners,<br>the wails of the wounded, the dying, becks<br>brimmed with blood, and the young king<br>thrown from his horse, drowned in his breastplate.<br>Thereafter Suleyman recalls he sat on the field<br>in the pouring rain on his glittering throne<br>to the long applause of his army: I am<br>Sultan Suleyman Han, son of Sultan Selim Han,<br>son of Sultan Bayezid Han. The shadow of God. <br>And they butcher the captives, dig the pits,<br>to bury their own brave dead, horses and men,<br>30 thousand whose last rainy day was this,<br>and the other dead lie in the rain, or scatter<br>their bones in the wetlands and the reedgrass.<br>Whatever birds pecked out their eyes<br>their names are no matter nor the stream<br>they drowned in nor the name of the planet<br>whose soft brown body they shovelled in after.<br>Thereafter the land burns and the churches,<br>thereafter women and slaves and silver.<br>And thereafter, pronounces the historian,<br>his quill's tip brushing his cheek, his point<br>squeaking over the page, the lamp's glint<br>on his inkhorn: the long Turkish night,<br>the tomb of the nation, dug in the rain. </div><div style="margin:10px 0">In the space of a moment, in the centuries<br>moments pile into, leaf over leaf,<br>season by season as the winters pass<br>and the wars roll over and the borders shift<br>it is ploughland, old bones surfacing<br>at the hoe's edge and the plough's iron,<br>scapulae and vertebrae rising in a flat<br>wide fenced country laid open to the wind,<br>prowled by the tractors of the collectives<br>and the same wandering birds, black earth<br>through white snow, wind beaten scarecrow<br>and the white silence of another winter.<br>It is a museum of bones in the thick boney<br>stew of each other, where some bird sings<br>in the evergreens and a boy rings a bell<br>in the long white silence that follows. </div><div style="margin:10px 0">It is a field of poles upright at a pit's rim,<br>carved into cruel faces, chiselled in grimaces,<br>spiked, helmeted, horned, a ragged line of posts<br>that are totems of men straggling off into trees,<br>some aslant, the long necks of horses<br>rearing from snow. They are flail and bludgeon<br>and battleaxe, calvaries of yokes and the bows<br>of the swift horsemen, the trailed arms<br>of the willow tree. They are the crescent moon<br>and the star, the cross, the crown, the turban<br>and the tarboosh, gnarled glances of soldiers,<br>the figures of dead men rising from the earth,<br>Suleyman with a basket of heads at his pommel<br>and the dead king Lajos in his blue bonnet.<br>Overhead the high jets in the clear blue<br>corridor of cloudless sky above Serbia,<br>flying the line of the great rivers<br>whose names are the same though the names<br>of the empires and the nations shift<br>on the maps. South of here, not far,<br>in the debateable lands of the warring states<br>the bones are again rising in the mud.</div><div style="margin:10px 0"><br>[...] <br>Very fast very slow the music<br>a lament from the villages<br>a music come down from the mountains<br>called across rivers across plains:<br>ah no joking and no joking<br>a gift for the kolo, bridegroom<br>the thieves they are singing<br>dance my love dance faster<br>faster till we fall down. </div><div style="margin:10px 0">The reedgrass that will be thatch<br>first snowy fields turned in the plough.<br>A line of trucks in a white field<br>waiting for grain not yet sown:<br>end of the winter quarter<br>end of the season of craving<br>the river's ice drifting south<br>snow collapsing from the buildings:<br>the days of the death of King Winter. </div><div style="margin:10px 0">The Busójárás. </div><div style="margin:10px 0">Time to take to the streets<br>wearing the skins of beasts<br>masks years in the making offspring<br>of the old whisperers in the hearth<br>kin to the devotees of trees<br>and certain stones and all rivers<br>lord of the vines and beasts<br>our lady of the wild things the old gods<br>who never made it into heaven. </div><div style="margin:10px 0">Busós. </div><div style="margin:10px 0">They step out of the unwritten<br>the unremembered out of Illyria<br>out of the south the dark the flight<br>and the distant remembrance of panic<br>the horned hoof footed hard drinking<br>god of the shepherds. They step out<br>through the winter streets in masks<br>horns in sheepskins and bandoliers<br>with their bells and their rattles. </div><div style="margin:10px 0">Busós. </div><div style="margin:10px 0">With their antlers tall in the skins<br>of beasts belled shaggy moustache men<br>huge with their clubs and horns<br>wild in their tall wooden masks<br>coming on from the distance<br>all the years they have travelled<br>out of the unwritten the agrapha<br>the history of the forgotten<br>the long shadows of the lost gods.<br>At noon they have crossed the river<br>they have taken the streets<br>filled with organized riot<br>the ruckus of men in the male dance<br>the clatter and rattle of flails<br>the interminable clanging of bells<br>rain clanking into buckets<br>in mockery taking their ways<br>through the orders of anarchy. </div><div style="margin:10px 0">Busós. </div><div style="margin:10px 0">Fierce and yet not fierce<br>joking and yet not joking<br>this is the management of chaos:<br>the war of the great ratchets<br>the battle of the bells upright animals<br>striding through the streets<br>through the cold falling sunlight<br>in a wild skirling music<br>bearing the skulls of animals. </div><div style="margin:10px 0">Busós. </div><div style="margin:10px 0">Others come as veiled hooded women<br>a brown friar another the devil<br>a joker in a Russian tank mask<br>a Groucho Marx an Austrian helmet.<br>And these others ghosts in dirty sheets<br>rags sackcloth and ashes and stocking masks<br>bunched in knots of impudent silence<br>young men scattering the girls<br>the dead risen from the dead. </div><div style="margin:10px 0">Centuries ago the traveller<br>Evliya Çelebi warned his far flung<br>wandering countrymen of the masked<br>madmen of Mohács in the marshland<br>in their shaggy jackets and bells<br>and their faceless faces:<br>they are devils devils<br>in the place of devils<br>no-one should go there.<br>In their own legend of themselves<br>they chased the Turks out of town<br>in terror. In the ill-disciplined<br>shaggy masked half-drunk ranks<br>among pitchforks and whirling clubs<br>the carved severed head on a stick<br>of a janissary, moustache top knot skull<br>goes round and round in the racket<br>and the gathering fire and the dusk. </div><div style="margin:10px 0">How years ago they were fearless<br>in the place of defeat and rose again<br>how years ago a pig's blood painted<br>a cross in the town square and how<br>the masks stained in animal blood<br>and the wild cries and the kolo<br>was their resistance. How once<br>they were one with the beasts<br>one with men one with the gods. </div><div style="margin:10px 0">Rutting and butting as beasts<br>sticks for pricks bells balls<br>and under the mask is another<br>and another they are Busós<br>three days of the year Busós<br>parading their ragged squads<br>to the square where the cannon<br>from that year of the rain<br>thunders mud and rags and smoke. </div><div style="margin:10px 0">Busós. </div><div style="margin:10px 0">Come nightfall on the third day<br>of marching and mayhem and music<br>that is Shrovetide the fire's lit<br>in the square. King Winter is dead<br>carted off in a coffin and burned.<br>On the coffin in flowery<br>Hungarian script: it's sold,<br>our country, it's sold, we have<br>nothing left but our fathers' pricks. </div><div style="margin:10px 0">Where does this music come from,<br>an old woman asks. From all round her<br>from everywhere from earth<br>from the wind from the long turned<br>furrows of defeat the old sorrow<br>the old joy the songs<br>of the long gone into the dark.<br>It's sold, our country,<br>and all the thieves are laughing. </div><div style="margin:10px 0">Time to march one last time<br>on the town and burn winter<br>with bells and cannon and fire<br>round and around the tottering square<br>masked men and horses the music<br>round and round the kolo<br>the dancing of the hairy men<br>and winter goes up in the flames<br>the tall smoke climbing the sky.<br>Busós. </div><div style="margin:10px 0">The sliver of moon the first star<br>on the pale blue flag of the sky<br>as the sparks flare and die. At the edge<br>of the embers of memory the borders<br>of hearing: bells laughter a child<br>a cough girls singing the swift music<br>in the ashes of the evening<br>whisps of voices at a distance<br>in that far off language.</div><div style="margin:10px 0"><br /></a><br />poem by <a href="http://en.citatepedia.ro/by.php?a=Ken+Smith">Ken Smith</a><div class=q>
<img src="https://www.citatepedia.ro/g/32share.png" style="float:left" alt="Share">
<script type="text/javascript" src="//s7.addthis.com/js/300/addthis_widget.js#pubid=citatepedia" async="async"></script><div style="display:inline-block" class="addthis_sharing_toolbox" data-url="http://en.citatepedia.ro/comments.php?id=429663" data-title="The Shadow of God de Ken Smith" data-description="To Mohács
in the marshlands, still in the pouring rain,
August 29th, 1526, where those summoned 
and hastily gathered died in thousands
in the space of a moment the chronicler
scribbles, in the safety of distance,
cruel panthers in a moment to he..."></div>
</div>
</div>