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Paul Hartal

The Dalai Lama Who Loved Wine, Women and Song

Here the May lilacs blossom in the garden
Their fragrance sprawls in the air of spring.

Yet my mind drifts on wings of a daydream
To a far away land of peach-treed valleys
Embraced by snow-capped mountains.

One night there on the Roof of the Earth
A young man in the holy city of Lhasa
Listened to the chanting of mantras
Not for the sake of enlightenment
But in order to sense her breath.

That month he span all the pray wheels
Not for the sake of freeing his soul
But in order to touch her finger prints.

That year he prostrated on the ground
With his hands clasping the earth
Not for the sake of adoring Buddha

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The Royal Air Force Hero and the Luftwaffe General

Britain fought for her life.
Hitler’s armies prepared
For an invasion of England.
Savage air battles took place
Over the skies of Albion.

Then a miracle happened:
In the summer and autumn of 1940
The Royal Air Force defeated
The numerically superior Luftwaffe.

This was a turning point in the war.
Lacking adequate air support,
The Fuehrer could not carry out
His invasion plans.

Deeply touched by the heroism
Of the pilots, Winston Churchill said:
“Never in the field of human conflict
Was so much owed by so many

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Honor and Betrayal (Jiangsu 1937-1945)

The bamboo leaves swished in the wind
As Lieutenant Ryouta Takahashi said goodbye
To his wife and son.

He made his way to the port
With measured steps,
His mind thick with heavy thoughts.

On route
To reinforce the Japanese garrison in Shanghai
The convoy set sail
From the Sasebo Naval Arsenal
In Nagasaki Prefecture.

It was part of the 3rd expeditionary fleet
Of the Imperial Japanese Navy
Consisting of a dozen cruisers and gunboats.

Their mission was to patrol the coasts
And river ways of China and to give support

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The Restaurant Keeper

In the City of Toronto there was once
a restaurant owned by a man named Imre Finta.
Born in 1912 in Austria-Hungary, Finta spent
his years of youth in my hometown Szeged,
immigrating to Canada after the Second World War.

Settling in Toronto, in 1953 Finta bought
the Candlelight Restaurant but it did not go well,
so he closed it. Then he opened The Moulin Rouge
on Avenue Road at DuPont Street.
The old fashioned Hungarian gentleman greeted
his guests warmly, politely kissing the right hand
of his female patrons.

I had never dined at the Moulin Rouge
but I encountered Finta in a brickyard and
at the railway station of Szeged in the summer
of 1944. At that time I was eight years old
and Finta, aged 32, was a Captain
of the Royal Hungarian Gendarmerie.

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Voyage around the Square Root of Minus One

I often heard
that while the sciences concern themselves
with objective truths
the arts deal with subjective phenomena.

Many years ago I held the same view,
but later came to the conclusion
that this is just a well-combed popular myth.

It is an untenable credo
because the sharp separation
of the arts and sciences is a rigid
and arbitrary mandate, full of holes.

Although all subjects have their specificities,
at the same time they also share
many common traits with each other.

There is art in science and science in art.

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Massacre in Nanjing

On a clear winter day you can see from Tokyo
The snow-capped volcanic cone of Mount Fuji.
Towering to a height of 3,776 meters on Honshu Island,
About 100 kilometers south-west from the capital,
The majestic mountain is a staunch symbol
Of the Land of the Rising Sun.

During the Sino-Japanese War of 1937-1945,
Hirohito's armies invaded China, carrying along
A fascist banner of samurai honor and pride.
The Japanese Imperial troops
Advanced with brutal force,
Committing dreadful atrocities
Against prisoners and civilians.
They reinterpreted bushido virtues and believed
That their war crimes elevated the splendor and glory
Of Mount Fuji to new heights.

Articles published in November and December 1937
In the Tokyo Nichi Nichi Shimbun reported the exploits

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Balkan Nightmares

The ghosts of history haunt the Balkans.
Ancient passions, unbending hatreds
turmoil the region.
Painful tragedies of the past
are recycled by memories.
Permanent hostage of bound
and determined remembrance,
Race, religion and poverty clash
in violent convulsions.

Ethnic warfare and ruthless fright
sweep across nations,
fuelled by explosions of grief, revenge
and fear.
They are immersed in horror,
terror, chaos and bloodshed,
the sufferings of children,
the sorrows of fathers,
and the agonies of widows.

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No Secret: The Rwandan Genocide

A remote source of the Nile,
the Kagera River originates in Burundi.
On its way to Lake Victoria it flows
into a steep gorge along the natural border
between Rwanda and Tanzania.
Before entering the ravine,
the river cascades in a small waterfall
that swells in the rainy season.

As the Kagera sweeps down from
the highlands it carries within its currents
vast clusters of uprooted trees embedded
in gigantic dollops of elephant grass.
In the spring and summer of 1994
it was still much the same.
However, this time also thousands
of human corpses floated on the river.

Rwanda and Burundi
are two tiny African countries,

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