The Exodus from Bohemia

  by IVAN DIVIS (1924 - 1999)


.../pp 30, 31/ 
Toward us, at the height of the second floor,
a flag was being crried,
on it the last and the first Czech blood;
I squatted down and - through the iron belts
of that monster - I saw
the square occupied by iron-cast quadruplets,
the barrels of which were aiming at the pigeons
in the rain-gutters of Tyn:
that's called   communism doing under itself
with fear.

An idea struck me: now, now if ever, to climb up
on that machine and hug that guy. BEHOLD -
I AM WITH YOU UNTIL THE END OF TIME!

But the worse things were still ahead.
Throughout one, Zdenek S., dead today,
was with me.
The spring after the attack, an awry spring.
We have set out with him
to the children's psychiatry. A priest from
uranium concentration camp worked there; yes,
that spring Czech farmer here and there
plowed up
a Russian leg or a Russian arm,
and that's called   communism in practice.

When we had arrived to our destination,
it was near Tabor,
after viewing the horrors
we have been waited on by the children,
we!  being waited on by the children of
throw-away souls,
and HOW! waited on!

I shall never again participate in such a feast,
something like that - of course - emigration
cannot provide,
and - as we were leaving,
as we were slamming the car doors of Tatra,
a little cross-eyed girl cought up with me,
and handed me a field flower.

I can tell you, my dear.

I kept that flower for a long, long time,
and then lost it;
perhaps in that moment,
as I was throwing treachery's likeness in the
garbage;
then - climbing up the steps from the yard -
I realized,
that I did not get rid of anything and of
anybody,
and that, therefore, I could not,
just as well, have lost that flower.

And that, my love,   is  sorrow...

What about those millions of souls,
that even now suffer on and on
and that will not stop torturing themselves,
finding no peace, wondering:
whether He,
to the thief on His right hand,
had not  promised merely from    p i t y!

These are not the souls of the damned,
these are the souls of the lost ones.
Yours and mine belong among them,
and that's not a   phenomenon, but the   truth.

These souls, however, precisely for
having been lost, shall be found  again,
found again by the hope not cared for by them,
but kept
-for them! -
by Him.

THUS  IT IS ALSO   WITH   THE CZECH LAND.


(Excerpt. Ivan Divis: ODCHOD Z CECH
 Poezie mimo domov Publishers, Munich, Fall 1981).
ODCHOD Z CECH  Copyright C by Ivan Divis, 1981.
Czech Translation Copyright C by Jirina Fuchsova, 1982.