Rescue
Laurie Kuntz
Miklos Radnoti was a writer from Budapest. The Jewish Hungarian poet
was shot in the head by German guards on a forced march from Yugoslavia
to Hungary during the last days of WWII. In a mass grave, two years later,
Radnoti's body was discovered and exhumed. His last poems, written on
postcards, were found in his coat pocket.
Radnoti, a twin, rescued at birth, lived in halves,
thinking of the mother and brother who didn’t survive,
and how from the wondrous womb,
he hurled into a world where fathers, too, leave,
a year before a boy becomes a man.
Left with whole lives gone,
Radnoti suffered the copper mines,
labor camps and death marches,
nothing spared, but his words—
Poems written to his wife,
on bits of paper, backs of postcards,
cured from the ground to seed against time
and the hands of men raking lands irreverent—
All unearthed, as Radnoti wrote,
“Patience flowers into death now.”
Delphiniums grow from the dirt,
the discarded mass, the rancid heap
where Radnoti’s body rotted,
bone on pebble, ink on gravel,
all that is rescued from soil to flower.
Laurie Kuntz is an award-winning poet and film producer. She taught creative writing and poetry in Japan, Thailand and the Philippines. Many of her poetic themes are a result of her work teaching in Southeast Asian refugee camps for over a decade after the Vietnam War years. She has published one poetry collection (Somewhere in the Telling, Mellen Press) and two chapbooks (Simple Gestures, Texas Review Press and Women at the Onsen, Blue Light Press), as well as an ESL reader (The New Arrival, Books 1 & 2, Prentice Hall Publishers). Her new poetry collection: The Moon Over My Mother’s House is forthcoming from Finishing Line Press in 2021. Her poetry has been nominated for a Pushcart Prize, and her chapbook, Simple Gestures, won the Texas Review Poetry Chapbook Contest. She has produced documentaries on the repeal of the Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell Law, and currently is a researcher for the documentary, Strangers to Peace, about the peace process and reintegration of guerrilla soldiers in Colombia. Her website is: https://lauriekuntz.myportfolio.com/home-1
“Rescue” is what poetry can do even in the aftermath of war and death—a poem can rescue us, to once again, flower.