THE EXILE DIARIES
23rd of February
White, swollen moon
like the belly
of the drowned.
Things will be alright,
Manolis said.
Manolis had a good heart.
Manolis
deep in the water
among the blind seaweed.
24th of February
The flashlight glows onto
two broken arms
and you couldn’t tell whether
the broken leg was yours.
It was when we met
under the big wall
each of us straddling
that broken leg that belonged to us.
Sound of Gas
That day, we were all busy: the burial, the inheritance; however, in each house, where one dies, suddenly, a grown child stands at the top of the stairs and looks around awkwardly as if he has to restore something; no one, of course, paid attention to him, and only the strange woman smiled at him as she placed the flowers inside the mysterious shadow where perhaps we had forever remained, and I remembered the room with the echo of gas when they hurriedly brought me in a child bloodied by the wheels of the car, the same woman had come in almost unnoticed, and then my eyes fell on the window where the curtains were in attention as if they also had to endure this.
Hunters
Two triggers of men with rifles
one’s finger trembles, squeezing
as he sees on crosshairs
the lone buck
the other’s finger caressing his fear
targets body of poacher
who hunts off season
two triggers summoned
to synchronize the jerking
motion of pulling when tree leaves
fall dancing peripherally
toward earth and sound at the speed
of death travels to living beings
unfamiliarly dealing them
to Hades adobe, two triggers
squeezed, pulled, bullets guided to
the heart of the matter as another
exhibit over fireplace will add
to deadly aspiration of two men
shooting Thanatos to two hearts
The Tree
This tree could be a man
yet to discover
where does his body go
or it could be the future
when the seed gets rotten and
sour apples grow
or the devil
who stayed behind and
during the nights
keeps shaking the branches
over the wild bodies.
Excerpt
Disgust sat openly on the officer’s face, though he himself was
hardly a heroic figure. The lieutenant was a strange man: the collar
of his shirt greasy, his tie and uniform stained and wrinkled, yet
his gait and posture carried a kind of royal, exalted air. No wonder
he overestimated himself. As we later learned, he had come to the
army from some tiny Moldavian village, exchanging a mud-brick
house for a city apartment. And beyond all that, he could command
others, indulge his malice and exercise that little limited power he
would never have known had he not chosen a military career.
Meanwhile, the dictator’s grand plans had come to include the
construction of the Transfăgărășan road, already well underway
by that year. Five years of agony, rocks blasted apart with six thousand
tons of dynamite, dozens of soldiers’ corpses sacrificed to the
project — and all of it presented in the news as though a monument
to the triumphant will of the people were being built, when
in truth it was only a monument to power and to human suffering.
Every month sealed metal coffins arrived, and we knew that no
one would ever see what lay inside them, because they were forbidden
to be opened.
Beneath every stone and every slab of concrete of the Transfăgărășan
pulsed the bone-breaking, soul-crushing reality of slave
labor. They built it over five years. At the funerals of fallen soldiers
we fired three shots into the air, then returned to the barracks as
though we had become participants in some endlessly repeating,
cold ritual practiced by the world only so we would never forget
how easily a human life can be replaced. The soldiers escorting
the coffins were forbidden to speak. The families were forbidden
to ask questions. And each coffin was another sign of this truth:
in that country even your death did not belong to you, but to the
state. The construction of the Transfăgărășan had already become
a legend while they were still only moving earth — not because of
its beauty or engineering brilliance, but because of the number of
dead, a number everyone knew and no one spoke aloud.
Pneuma
Nothing had remained in the room but the moist
of her sigh, falling star, orphan in the gleaming sky
a stolen kiss, spring morning, her shoulder, long hair
golden wavy breeze, shy beautiful glance just
escaping through the half-open eyelid, pond surface
where the loon took refuge, the osprey’s tail which
you saw, or you didn’t, her fiery mound, bittersweet
surprise like her breath that stopped momentarily.
That night it rained so heavily no one could hear our
moans. And our sins, what was their purpose?
I like those who don’t keep for themselves even a drop
of pneuma, but struggle only to be pneuma of virtue.
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Night of the Forgotten
This man
with the hard words
in the night
without his voice
comes and calls you
you severed one of your arms
you, forgotten one
you cut off one of your breasts
you, forgotten one
he comes and calls you
you don’t have eyes anymore
you, forgotten one
he comes and calls you
you go,
forgotten one,
groping
into the black water wells
you don’t burn
your kiss
you don’t fall
in the well
you don’t control
your blood
when he leans
heavy over you
to take one of
his fingers
to make the nights
yours
to turn into dawn
whole again
beautiful again
the dawn
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Change of Times
Now that time has come, you have to be able
not only to fight for victory up to the end
but to endure it without conceit and wild joy
and more so to accept the timely defeat,
to admit it without humiliation and fake composure.
The others’ compassion and envy, the secret joy,
whatever form they might take, they enrich you
yet you never place responsibility on others
nor assume the whole responsibility yourself;
don’t look for good luck or postponements,
for unforeseen events which will always appear,
be careful especially for the hedonistic palindrome
between self-justification and self-condemnation.
You’ll come out of this a little wiser, if you only
learn to face all human things a bit more serenely.
Nostalgia
The melodic lines of the statue of Nike
standing in the middle of the square
still sing in my ears as a blonde
woman with straw hair talks
in a tone I cannot follow
yet I listen attentively for reasons
of civility as dusk embraces
my thoughts about success and
lots of money, time to have some,
and when she will try to touch me, I’ll
be re waiting for my chance,
yearning for my new day to start
in the peaceful serenity of old age
and promise that next time
I shall aim in the same direction
before dusk comes with its purple colours
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Excerpt
“Thank God she didn’t break her back. Or her neck,” said Mother Ross.
“Uncle Finnegan is very good with young Dermot apparently and takes him to the strand every day. But it seems the troubles are bothering everybody down there.” Caitlin opened up the letter. “Let me see now. ‘Flynn’s gained three pounds in less than a month,’ Nora writes, ‘ most of it in this past week in Dublin. He has bought a new jumper.’”
“That sounds like Nora,” said Mother Ross.
“Here we are,” Caitlin said, reading the letter aloud. “‘It would be perfect here, Caitlin, if it wasn’t for all the trouble in the country, and people going about their business as if living in a bad dream and not knowing if it’s going to get worse or better before they wake up. All they seem to be able to talk about is Sinn Fein, Eamon de Valera and the possibility of civil war, together with the latest outrage. Altogether a hundred incidents were reported yesterday from all over the country, mostly the burning of vacated police barracks and income tax offices. There was one murder, three mail-van robberies, a bomb explosion, the burning of a courthouse and I can’t remember what else. During the past couple of days no less than six police officers have been murdered in circumstances of revolting cruelty. I won’t go into details.’”
Caitlin turned to another page with a quick glance at the serious face of Mother Ross. “‘Last night we were visiting some friends of Uncle Finnegan’s—Flynn has never called him by his Christian name, which is Aloysius, because he could never say it properly when he was a little boy. Anyway it was a good night in this friend’s house, but a bad night around the city. Five unoccupied police barracks were set on fire. One was Bessborough Barracks near Phoenix Park, close to where the attempt was made to murder Lord French last December. Another was the old RIC barrack at Ballybrack, less than a mile from where we are staying. At the party last night there was a very nice man called O’Rourke, Eugene O’Rourke, I think, a head gardener for a man called Muldoon. Just after he left for home we heard shots. Poor Mr O’Rourke’s body was found lying on the Strathmore road at the foot of Dalkey Hill. I just couldn’t get over it today. No one knows how he came to be killed. The speculation is that he failed to answer the challenge of one of the sentries posted by the Republican terrorists who were lighting the fires and so got shot. Flynn tries to argue that all these things are bound to happen in a war situation but even he, I could see, was upset by Mr O’Rourke’s death.’”
Caitlin lowered the letter. “Isn’t it just awful? What’s happening down there.”
