With her new camera, a Christmas present,
and with the intuitive surety,
at not quite nine, of how to make a picture,
she makes a sunlit panorama of Pest
from the Fisherman’s Bastion in Buda –
a Magyar edifice of walls and towers
built in the nineteen hundreds to celebrate
the permanence of the Habsburg Empire.
In a wall’s shadow she shows me the screen,
and what she has angled by chance. I note
the parliament building, the Great Synagogue,
the space where Imry Nagy’s statue was.
Beside a bronze equestrian statue
of Stephen the First, between the Bastion
and St Matthias Church, a white tailed eagle
and its handler (dressed for Ruritania)
wait for selfies with passing tourists.
She catches one such from the rear – a man
diminished by the bird perched on his shoulder.
By David Selzer