Report from the Other World – poem

There is pushing and shoving now at the railed gates

of Non-Being – the young mass-murderers

are queuing up for their reward in heaven.

Because they too in the end were blown apart,

the question remains: can they be reassembled

by the demons of the Prophet disguised as angels

or will their bodies go into orbit

somewhere in Alpha Centauri as space-waste?

It soon transpires that the promised virgins exist

only in propaganda brochures, but in any case

what persists of them and in what form?

Impossible to tell what will happen to the victims –

which of them will be saved and which will have

instead of eternal life a bleak, dark, final rest.

One thing is certain: it won’t be only the drones

that before long reach these selfless champions of death

but the curses of those who through them have been driven

away from the burnt-out ruins of their homes.

Translated from the Hungarian by Clive Wilmer and the Author