Untitled by Peter Molnar
About the author: Peter Molnar is a free speech scholar and the inventor and director of the “Hate Speech” Monologues at CEU, the 2018/19 National Slam Poetry Champion of Hungary, and a voluntary host for “Courage of Thought” on Radio Tilos (Forbidden). He was a founder, vice president and member of Parliament of Fidesz.
I write slam also in English,
escaping my Hungarian mind, distorted
words,
runaway, return, runaway, return.
You tell me each day is a fight,
for me too,
I am the only one who doesn’t call the gov-
erning party of Hungary, Fidesz.
It ceased to exist 25 years ago.
We couldn`t stop the concentration of
power
that builds up in the country too.
It was a nice crowd,
not worse than us.
The impact of power.
I saw it, I saw it, I saw it!
We wanted a democracy that makes the
world say: Wow!
We got it. In a way.
I watch it in icy loneliness,
those who were once in Fidesz and now
are in the afterparty
greet me with respect,
like my slams,
at the evening meetings of their leadership
Viktor himself quotes me:
“If possible, I don’t want to stay much lat- er than midnight.”
I wish another sentence of mine had such
an impact on him!
I write slam also in English,
escaping my Hungarian mind, distorted
words,
runaway, return, runaway, return.
I look from the American New York to the
Central European one, Budapest,
the only city here that remained also Jew-
ish.
I want to speak sharply,
without fear,
especially if there is no reason for fear,
other than fear itself.
I internalize the text,
getting the lines right,
sharpening as the flight of birds,
without unnecessary moves,
let them arrive exactly where they belong!
I hear them on my Swedish social demo-
cratic bike,
from Buda hills as seen from Pest streets,
from red paint brush branches,
from slams of crows,
in dreams, waking up,
from the words of my mother.
The flow of the text is the sound of the for- est,
it lives in me, and I live in it,
the text is me.
The text is my soul, body, tongue, garden,
the Margareth Island with Longarmed
Planetree,
who speaks in the wind with her leaves,
my words are also her words.
She saw the nineteenth Century Hungarian
poet, old Janos Arany writing poems,
the old Hungary that could become the
Central-European Union,
before Hungary became the biggest loser
of the first world war,
and before the Hungarian Holocaust.
Hungarian Jews were shut to the Danube,
but the river is still here.
As Longarmed Planetree livesat the Island,
my mother lives in a street named after the
Serb Damjanich who was among thirteen
executed generals of the mid-nineteenth
Century Hungarian freedom fight,
my mother heard from a family member
how Serb babies were smashed to the wall
in the first world war, and she saw the sec-
ond,
her words are also my words.
From her the lines are coming in Hungar-
ian,
like yellow trams in sunshine,
I couldn`t avoid them
even if I wanted too,
I don`t,
I would rather give up my belief,
If I had one,
I have,
just another way.
I write slam also in English,
escaping my Hungarian mind, distorted
words,
runaway, return, runaway, return.
My mother is waiting in her doorway,
I give her a branch of Long-armed,
they meet.
Is it me who is not......... conservative?