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    • May 2013

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I have seen eternity and it is like this,

a man and woman dancing in a bar

in a poor street on an unswept floor.

It clings and plots and is desperate,

at a point between violence and abjection,

between warmth and agoraphobic fear.

Let me reverse this and accept the fear.

Let me drop all objections to abjection,

since life itself  is desperate

and has to tread the unswept floor

carefully, lovingly, while the bar

hovers in eternity. Like this.

Source: Poetry (February 2008).

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MORE FROM THIS ISSUE

This poem originally appeared in the February 2008 issue of Poetry magazine

• J. Learns the Difference Between Poverty and Having No Money
  by Jeffrey Schultz
• Letter to the Editor
  by Jim Carmin
• Letter to the Editor
  by Robert Longoni

• February 2008 Table of Contents
• Subscribe to Poetry magazine
• About Poetry magazine
• Buy This Issue

More about this poem

Biography

George Szirtes was born in Hungary and emigrated to England with his parents—survivors of concentration and labor camps—after the 1956 Budapest uprising.

Szirtes studied painting at Harrow School of Art and Leeds College of Art and Design. At Leeds he studied with Martin Bell, who encouraged Szirtes as he began to develop his poetic themes: an engaging mix of British individualism and European fluency in myth, fairy tale, and . . .

Continue reading this biography

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Poems by George Szirtes

• Doisneau: Underground Press
• Kertész: Latrine
• Kolár: Housing Estate
• Ross: Children of the Ghetto
• Ross: Yellow Star

• More poems by George Szirtes (6 poems)
  • Sudek: Tree

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Poem Categorization

SUBJECT Living, Time & Brevity, Relationships, Men & Women

POET’S REGION England

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Related

Audio

• Poem of the Day: My Fathers, Coming and Going
• Poem of the Day: Petersen: Kleichen and a Man
• Poem of the Day: Ross: Children of the Ghetto
• The Poetry Magazine Podcast: When Guns Talk the Muses Fall Silent

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