Featured Fifty Poetry: about to decide

Gabor G. Gyukics, born 1958, is an Hungarian-American poet and literary translator. He has five books of original poetry -- four in Hungarian and one bilingual (Last Smile) -- and nine books of translations, including A Transparent Lion, selected poetry of Attila József. He writes in English (his second language) and in Hungarian. Gabor lived in Holland for two years before moving to the U.S., where he lived between 1988 and 2002. He presently resides in Budapest, and is working on translating the poetic works of North American Indigenous poets for an anthology to be published in Hungarian. Gabor's latest book of poetry was published in Hungarian in October 2011 by L'Harmattan Press in Budapest.

This is seemingly a nature poem, yet it has a surreal element with the help of the snow, the ice and the train, and it might deal with humanity at large, only the characters are replaced with birds.

through the inter-facial
hair-tiny crack
of the locked train window
blown in snow pellets
freeze an iced relief
on the windowsill

the rushing train
scares a heron away
from the iced sedge marsh
along the tracks

a raven chases off
a pair of turtle doves
from a pine tree bough
to see the tracks
drilling through the woods

a pine needle punctures the snow
and suffocates in an ice sheath

a magpie is watching all these

this bird is still at home
it wouldn't want to go
where the sky is not the same