Long Listed for the 2023 Griffin Poetry Awards

2023 Longlist Announcement

Pointless wandering in the streets, foggy lights

          that distort the faces

trying among the crowd to steal a little of the others’

          indifference

undressing all the women as if to discover a rose

from her; believing in yourself, like a child who

hides behind the humble chair with the hole

and fools himself that he’s not seen.

My hands are two heavy useless animals since

            they don’t hug you

I hate my eyes that don’t reflect your smile anymore

I’d like to pound the streets with my fists, the busses,

trolleys which once led us to our happiness and

to create a deserted city because of your unbearable

            absence.

Foggy, sleepy windows of the earthly taverns

where drunkenness, craziness, misfortune and

a piece of the sky’s starlit indifference are reflected.

And always that strange sense of the haunted deserter

who, between the death he escaped and the death

that waits for him,

suddenly, teary, feels the futility of all triumphs

and the resignation of its denial.

No, not from the enemy, comrade, tonight protect

               yourself from me.

https://www.lulu.com/account/projects/ke4yv6?page=1&pageSize=10

ORESTES (Excerpt)

And she insists to mix honey and water for the dead

who don’t feel thirsty anymore nor hungry, nor do they

have a mouth; dead who don’t dream of restitutions or

revenge. She always evokes her unmistaken (which one?)

perhaps to avoid the responsibility of her decision and

choice, when the teeth of the dead, naked, scattered on

the soil, become the white seeds in an immense, black

plain that will sprout the only true, invisible, snow white

trees that will phosphoresce in the moonlight to the end

of times.

Ah, how she can deal with such words out of her mouth,

words taken out of, yes, old chests (like those decorated

with big nails), words pulled up from amid mother’s

old hats, which she doesn’t wear anymore. You saw her

in the garden this afternoon? — how nice she still is —

she hasn’t aged at all, perhaps because she looks after

time and acts accordingly — I mean she renews herself

knowing the youth she loses and perhaps this way she

reacquires it.

https://www.lulu.com/account/projects/w454dzp?page=1&pageSize=10