Long Listed for the 2023 Griffin Poetry Awards
That morning I woke up with this unbearable grief of
not ever having talked about heliotropes; it was strange,
if not contemptible. I searched the rooms, the hallway,
I walked down to the basement, “how did my childhood
years fit in this?” I asked myself and smiled, “I must had
been somewhere else” and I remembered mother at night
all alone in the room; she wore that old hat with feathers
as if to show that everything had ended.
Exhausted I sat on the stairs, when the bell rang; I went
and opened, it was again the man with the axe, “you idiot”,
I said to him, “who do you pretend to be? I simply think
of you”. “And you think you can escape?” He said to me.
Manolis Aligizakis 