DECISION
Poor besieged neighbourhood. The cloths on the cloths-line
resemble the ravaged flags of life. The damp colours shine
in the sunshine and the honest patches on the elbows and
the knees on the inside shirts and underwear — like freshly
painted skylights — if you look inside,
you’ll find each of them in its place, strong and enduring —
our neighbourhood travels with its cloths on the cloths-line
in the sunshine like a ship decorated with flags during
the fifteenth of August celebration in Tinos.
Then Alex sat on the stairs of the foreign house
and said: I love our group so much that I feel like crying
and he wiped his shoes with his hand.
And we felt the urge to kiss his dusty hands.
They killed Alex. When we pass that place in the evening
we see our motherland sitting at those same stairs
with its wiped shoes.
We are not afraid anymore. We’ll surely break down the door.
The factory closed. The young girls return from work.
Their lunch tins are carefully wrapped in cloth-napkins.
As they pass
a smell of forest remains on the road as if spring is three
steps behind them.
The girls have grown, they’ve become serious. They don’t laugh
on their way anymore.
Their eyes are large and brotherly.
They kneed our anger and sorrow in their empty troughs. The stars
stir over the roof with a soft stir like sugar in the paper bag.
We’ll have flour day after tomorrow, we say, and sugar and
these girls will kneed the church bread offerings, large, round
and splattered with icing sugar and stamped not with those stamps
with the Byzantine letters but with their own hands, thin and
strong, with the hands that were schooled in the sorrow
of the whole world.
Athens 1941—1942
Manolis 