An Old Man On the River Bank
For Nani Panagiotopoulos
And yet we have to consider how to proceed.
To feel is not enough, nor to think, nor to move
nor to risk your body in the ancient embrasure,
when the boiling oil and molten lead groove the walls.
And yet we have to consider to what direction we go ahead
not the way our pain desires it and our hungry children
and the chasm of our comrades’ call from the opposite shore
not even the darkened light whispers it in the improvised hospital,
the pharmaceutical shine on the young man operated on at noon
but in some other way perhaps I mean to say that
the long river that emerges from the great lakes enclosed deep in Africa
and at sometime it was god and then it turned into road and benefactor and judge and delta that is never the same as the wise old people taught
and yet it always remains the same body,
the same bed and the same Point, the same orientation.
I don’t want anything else but to speak simply, let this grace be granted to me.
Because even our song we’ve loaded with so much music that it slowly sinks
and our art we’ve decorated so much that its features are eaten by the gold
and it is time that we say our few words because tomorrow our soul sails away.
If pain is human, we are not human just to suffer pain
that’s why I contemplate so much these days about the great river
this image that goes forward between herbs and verdure
and beasts that graze and drink and people who sow and harvest
and even in great tombs and small plots of the dead.
This current that leads its way and that is not at all different from the blood of men
and from the eyes of men when they stare straight ahead without any fear in their hearts
without the everyday shiver about the little things or even the great ones
when they stare straight ahead like the wayfarer who is used to find his way guided by the stars
not like us, the other day, looking at the enclosed orchard of a sleepy Arabic house
behind the lattice, the fresh garden changed shape, growing larger and smaller
changing as we looked at it; we changed the shape of our desire and our hearts
at high noon, us the patient dough of a world that pushes us away and kneads us,
caught in the ornamented nets of life that was right
and then it turned into dust and sank in the sand
leaving behind it only that indecipherable dizzying sway of a tall palm tree.
Manolis Aligizakis 