5
Oh, my good old comrades, hastily buried, as if one
had only one more night to live:
the uninteresting Elias, Thomas with the stolen
fur and the most unfortunate, Amen, the over-religious;
when he died we sat next to him, his pants ballooned
because of his hernia,
unfortunate Amen had never been with a woman since
the years of our First Fathers.
My good old comrades you passed so simply like
the uneducated villager who repeats an indecipherable
Oh Lord our Father
although the smoke still rises.
Sometimes I think that our true life is unfolding behind
the wall
and the first killing was premeditated; the promise
wasn’t absent nor was the pale tenant, nor the silent
road with the closed stores;
miserable people they’ll never find out what was written
on that primeval seal
and that an umbrella is but a ghost that doesn’t ever
forgive.
My friends with who I talked night after night about
the fate of the world
and among the small interruptions of our talks was
what we left behind for the others, impossible to
survive and so familiar
that you may pass by it without noticing.
Years passed this way. The sick waited for the opening
of the old carpentry
I preferred to go up to the attic; the blind man with the
threads stayed there
while the other tenants lived downstairs imagining that
they truly lived;
“You may lay me”, the ugly woman said “but place a napkin
on my face”
dark, impenetrable, moist from top to bottom like a
great meaning and when
Chryssostomos smelled because of the gangrene
she stood at the door and scare away the dogs; one
night, in fact, but what can you call them “thieves”
I yelled,
people passed by, cried, or made bets since there was
always a black horse where you couldn’t see anything
and alcohol has its stony wing too.
Manolis 