Long Listed for the 2023 Griffin Poetry Awards

2023 Longlist Announcement

DAYS OF ANGER ii

II

I asked the caretaker for the key; I pushed aside the open,

dripping umbrellas in the hallway and I unlocked; the letter

was still there on the night table, twenty years later, a

woman was lighting a candle “who are you?” I asked,

“you know me well” she said to me. I shivered. I saw

the executioner through the open window. He was often

dipping his hands in water “The asshole, he’s washing

his hands” I yelled “no, he doesn’t like seeing

his ugly fingers” they told me. An old woman was sitting

at the entrance unraveling a ball of wool; for which

dream or which return? The glow of the dawning day

flooded the poor people in the street with golden hues.

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PERSEPHONE (excerpt)

Sometimes

when I walk in the garden absentmindedly under

the poplars or when I clean a shirt in the stony basin

or I let my hand rest on my chest or I hold a flower

with my own girly tenderness I suddenly feel naked,

pinned on the wall or on the trunk of a tree or

in the metal entrance mirror, especially there,

in the mirror, double pinned, double seen, without

refuge, without any leaf, in a concentrated lucidity,

lighted from outside and from inside by two spotlights

of his breath which dash out of its narrow meaningful

nostrils, its oracular, sensual, religious nostrils.

Send it away, send it away

I yelled at him, fixated there, angry with a vague

guilt or innocence, I had nothing to hide, free

in my indisposition.

Only my hair flowed everywhere, getting in and

out of its nostrils like restless roots that shone

around me like wings and waves. I saw them.

They gave me back a different pride, my pride,

an independence opposite the dog and its master.

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Δημήτρης Χιλλ, από τον “Κιθαιρώνα”