Korniss Péter - Erdős Virág: Courtyards - Our Budapest (Budapest, 1993)

A house is being built.

Industrious hammering all about the courtyard.

it’s growing downwards, a hundred storeys or so, equipped with everything you can find high and low, water and electricity and window frames and all, even the tiny cracks on the bare wall, the blood of the chief mason’s wife is mixed to the mortar to strengthen the edifice, and the timbers rise in hundreds towards the sky, so that they make you stare if you pass by, a carpenter climbs his stepless ladder, light trickles in stripes down from his pocket, winds float a cloud here to tile the roofs with, a tiler’s sitting on its rim ready to dock it, and while down there nothing grows but propwood and grass, a wonder is not unlikely yet to pass, for time makes his inspecting rounds clattering with his folding rule.

And look, the tower is built by the evening.

Even if the house underneath tumbles down by morning.

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