PUBLIC GARDEN
Ah, yes, they all put their secret letters into it: ecstatic
women whose dresses balloon while there is not wind
at all,
sad ephebes who still don’t know of their beauty,
especially those silent men; and if by chance a child
comes who can’t reach to put the letter in the mailbox,
it lowers its shoulders a little or it kneels —
and you’d think that, one day, it’ll deliver all these letters
into the hand of God.
I never learned the reason nor its importance
perhaps it happened accidentally. I don’t know. I’m waiting
for the lights to be turned on in the park, as if someone has
promised it to me.
I don’t ask further. People here, under the big trees, seem
small and insignificant and their passions
even more insignificant, however you can’t measure them
with the trees, they don’t know, they’re measured with
the bread, their rent, and truly, with the small hole
a bullet makes, from where all their life can be emptied —
of course, it can. Time has passed.
Manolis Aligizakis 