Two poems by Susanna Rich

Praying to St. Stephen's Hand

        Can you feel his sure, tireless hand
amongst the leaves? 

  —From Sándor Csoóri’s “Meghallod-e-még?”

I grasp my grief and non-belonging
like a nosegay of paper poppies to
enter this Budapest basilica, pass the velvet-
covered cordon chain, show my ticket to
The Sanctuary of St. Stephen’s Hand.

They call it Szent Jobb—Holy Right,
Better—the left, beyond mouldering, with
Stephen’s other parts, scattered, like memories,
almost a thousand years throughout Hungary—
ancient custom: dissect and bury the king over his

larger body—the land. Into the slot I slip a 100
forint coin—stainless steel ringing a brass core—
for my ration of illumination: an ossified fist lying
in a glass casket among gold acacia leaves—single
Christmas bulb dull. I’m too distracted by the guardian

in Roman collar (and my anticipation of the end of light)
to feel an awe to flatter myself, if momentarily, that I am home
with the Father—that he waits for me, that he might hold
the boy my father was, drifting on hillsides
espaliered with grapevines; and the girl who would

marry him, picking peaches into her apron. I am hungry,
here. On my knees.  Cold. Always the import—west
of the Prime Meridian or east.  Tongue dancing to
strains of someone else’s music.  I am the thief in diaspora—
camera around her neck, world web on her back.

Needing what? The claw of my father’s hand lay
on the hospital sheet—gone was the ebony he hammered
of his thumbnails; gone, the fingers tying my laces.
What I have left: his reaching through my fingers, as if
through gloves, pressing them together, as if in prayer.

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