The Voice

(Bust from My Window, New York, 1979,
by André Kertész, 1894-1985, Hungarian-
born photographer)

When Elizabeth, his wife, muse, and model, died in 1977, the photographer André Kertész descended into grief, no longer able to do any work. Then, one day, he found a small glass bust in a New York bookstore and embarked on a completely new period of creativity. The bust became a stand-in for his beloved in many of his photographic tributes to her.

THE VOICE

Woman much missed, how you call to me, call to me,
Saying that now you are not as you were
When you had changed from the one who was all to me,
But as at first, when our day was fair.

Can it be you that I hear? Let me view you, then,
Standing as when I drew near to the town
Where you would wait for me: yes, as I knew you then,
Even to the original air-blue gown!

Or is it only the breeze, in its listlessness
Traveling across the wet mead to me here,
You being ever dissolved to wan wistlessness,
Heard no more again far or near?

Thus I; faltering forward,
Leaves around me falling,
Wind oozing thin through the thorn from norward,
And the woman calling.

~ Thomas Hardy (1840-1928), English novelist and poet