A POEM ABOUT A NOTEBOOK OF POEMS FOUND IN A MASS GRAVE

The following poem, written by Slovenian poet Iztok Osojnik as Part 4 of a sequence entitled 'Waiting for Rain', incorporates the story of how a notebook of poems by the Hungarian poet Miklós Radnóti was discovered in a mass grave. The poems were written on a forced march westwards from a labour camp in Serbia, in 1944. The line in italics towards the end of Osojnik's poem is quoted from the last-dated poem in Radnóti's notebook, written a couple of days before the poet was executed for being too sick to continue.

a year after the killings near the village of Abda,  

in the year nineteen forty-five in a mass grave

in the greatcoat pocket of the corpse of Miklós Radnóti 

one of the forced labourers who was shot

they discovered a small notebook of poems with the title Razglednicák

I was woken by the prowling of wolves around the house

I turned on the light and reached for the slim edition  – Forced March

translated into English 

by Clive Wilmer & George Gömöri

the men stooping to urinate pass blood

the wolves howled in the rain

nocturnal anxiety, the stillness of the bathroom in yellow light

from the energy-saving light bulb

the slow methodic clipping of nails

IZTOK OSOJNIK 

(Translated from the Slovene by Špela Drnovšek Zork and Ciaran O'Driscoll)