Song
I walked all around your house (the moth flew
around the lamp until it met its sweet death) though
you didn’t come out that I’d burn into the flame of your eyes.
Alas, the fragrance of the body and of the soul
contamination will spoil one night
even more alas since I won’t be the spoiler.
Flowers of the rock before the green sea
with veins that reminded me of other loves
gleaming in the slow drizzle
flowers of the rock, faces
that came when none spoke and spoke to me
that they let me touch them after the silence
among pine trees, oleanders and plane trees.
Long-listed for the 2023 Griffin Poetry Awards
a barren woman who cries by the door, sniffing in
her snot,
just to hear a child, until a small tiny star takes my
last argument away
that the world isn’t nice at all.
When I finally decided to start it was already late.
All Homeric adventures were sang many years ago
only a few flashlights with their yellow light were left
and the nostalgia of a world beyond this world. I
of course tried to familiarize myself plucking poultry
or sitting on the toilet with the rats where I used to die
a little at a time
an impossible thing since each time they rang the bell
I always appeared in front of them, a corpse full
of life;
then I took after the fly and its daily chores or someone
who killed and after he went to eat at the restaurant,
having a letter in his pocket, the letter with the divine
confession that no one ever received.
Another time I’ll narrate to you about the witness who
was very thirsty in the desert, they say, until he died
in order to write his name in the water.
excerpt
these voices of the innumerable people, pagans as they were called,
the ones who had died under the knife of the first Christians, who
exterminated thousands and thousands, as the scholars claimed,
perhaps even millions, to establish the new religion? It was written
in certain books, not of course in the regular books taught in
schools, that millions of Hellenes were eliminated so Christianity
could spread over the lands, and perhaps these voices and groans
Hermes was hearing coming from the depths of the earth were none
other than the pain those millions of Hellenes suffered.
He stood motionless as if to listen to a discourse coming from
somewhere deep under the floor of the monastery, groans of people
killed and buried under the soil of this church, when unexpectedly
a thought came to him: did the purpose justified the means when a
man is condemned to death for the success of a movement, did the
death of a man in the hands of another was rightfully approved by the
system which always craves to retain power over the people? And what
about the killing of a brother by brother, only for the killer to gain the
approval and help of a superior? Such thoughts overtook Hermes to
the point of feeling sick, indeed he felt the need to run away, far away
from this place, which he had visited with all the positive intentions of
looking into the monastery correspondence. He felt suffocated. He put
the papers away, he walked out of the church, he didn’t stop to thank
the monk who helped him, he just walked out at a fast pace as if to distance
himself from voices and images he wanted to forget.
Then, when far out, he felt his heart had calmed down as he
climbed a short hill since he wanted to change his route and followed
a narrow trail towards the top of the hill to reach his village on the
other side. He surely felt a lot better, and quite unexpectedly, a tune
rose from within his essence to his lips, and he started singing a local
tune; soon, he reached the top of the hill and found an old man on a
donkey right ahead of him. He greeted him and then asked,
“Are there any partridges around here, Uncle?”
“I have seen a couple of flocks over that mountain,” the old man
pointed to the other side of the horizon.
Disfigurements
The modest, the simple, the right to bread, the bed that
was made of planks, a humble window without a feather
a few books next to it. A lightness blown straight from
the afternoon sky. Here, only here, the minimal, the
basics of the internal view, the alarm clock, the saw,
the shelf,
with the green bottles, and the naked arm on the chest.
We, of course, had our secret dead men and other
distances, long, short, with shops lit, between 7 and 10
o’clock, by old oil lamps, where the naïve daughter, half
dressed, for the first time discerns, in the old mirror,
her right leg enlarged up to the opposite hill and the cart
with the long crests that passed and missed her.
Today you won’t awake
one who’s in deep sleep
today you won’t only bring
a new dawn to the world
but you’ll accomplish
something amazing: all
the immortals who have
died, those I buried myself
the immortals who have died
you’ll bring to life with your
music of resurrection.
For this you have brought me
to the cemetery, here to wait
and for this all things around
here are joyous and bloomed
and rejoicing, which I’ve never
seen before around the graves
nor have I seen cypresses
so flexible like now, like
bodies that wish to embrace
and kiss like newlyweds.
And the graves are but tables
waiting to be set with flavourful
foods for crowned revellers
who’ll come and feast until
the new rosy dawn comes.
Past
Looking back
I wonder why
everything I left without
any effort to change them
remained as beautiful
as nature had crafted them.
Who was I, after all
who once wished to shift
the balance of the universe
by changing the depth
of the beautiful cove
of a woman’s body
and the length of a man’s penis
without the Grand Master’s plan?
In Alexandria (31 B.C.)
From his small town, close to the suburbs
and still full of dust from the trip
the travelling salesman arrives. And “Frankincense” and “Gum!”
“The Finest Olive Oil!” “Fragrance for your Hair!”
He cries out on the streets. But the big noise of people,
and the music and the parades won’t let him be heard.
The crowd pushes him, pulls him along, hits him.
And when finally, totally dazed, he asks, what madness is this?
Someone throws at him the gigantic lie
of the palace, that Anthony triumphs in Greece.
Between her horns it held a heavy piece of the sky
like a crown. A little later it lowered her head and
drank some water from the creek licking, with her
bloodied tongue, the other cool tongue of her
watery idol, as if licking her internal maternally,
serenely, irreversibly, widely her internal wound
from the outside, as if licking the silent, great, round
wound of the world — perhaps it even quenched its
thirst — perhaps our blood is the only thing that
quenches our thirst — who knows.
Soon after she raised her head over the water, not
touching anything, untouched too and serene like
a saint, and only a small lake made of the blood
of her lips remained between her feet that were
rooted in the river, a small red lake, in the shape
of a map that slowly enlarged and vanished, melted
as if its painless, freed blood traveled far away to
an invisible vein of the cosmos; and for that reason
she was calm, as if she had learned that our blood
doesn’t vanish, that nothing vanishes, nothing,
in this great nothing, the inconsolable, cruel,
incomparable, so sweet, so consolable, so nothing.
Centaur
Morning and the horses neigh
tied onto the froth of impenitent sea
rustle of naked leaves punished
leaves forty times lashed by the winds
climbs on the shoulder-blade of Sunday
and on the Pelion waters.
Here the blood of serpents poisons
the ripen languor of serenity
like rust the veins of marble and
time gathers the wings of ash
to debate with the blond gables
now that in the sleep of the olive tree
the spider forms its wrinkly netting.
In the fields the lustful sprouts
quiver and bathe
in the fountain of convulsion.
Manolis Aligizakis 