A Concert at the Reformed Music Festival on Bakáts Square, Budapest by Diana Senechal

What carried me from zero to one?
Wings marrowed with the knowledge
(inexplicable) that I had to come.
You know it: when your feet lift
you out the door, fatigue and cough
be damned, and the train clatters
to a beat it never tested until now.

The rain tiptoed, then gave in, tumbling
to songs of spiral, forest and plunge.
Infinity swinging from leafy chords.
The night before, a crowd of thousands
thrummed to the cadence of these songs.
Today we were fewer, but why make idols
of numbers crumbling as we speak?

We had all been standing or sitting
some polite meters away from the stage,
sopping, absorbed, when someone declared,
“heck, to heaven with it!” and clambered close.
We all followed suit, huddling together
under several umbrellas. “Gyere, gyere
közelebb,” a woman insisted, holding hers

over me. I gave in, all the rebels did,
lightning, grief, the sun dark as a zero, 
to where no one could claim the sky
didn’t know these songs by heart, hadn’t
borne them for aeons, or that any of us
had contours that could confidently boast,
I am impervious to God’s watercolor.

Notes
The Reformed Church in Hungary organizes an annual Reformed Music Festival. This particular concert (by the Platon Karataev duo) was not expressly religious in nature.
“Gyere, gyere közelebb” (in Hungarian) means “Come, come closer.”