There are no women or any children

only old grey-haired, middle-aged men

and lads and they slowly come

stooping and tired as if getting out

of hiding places inside the earth or

from some sunless dungeons.

They stop awhile and tremble

unfamiliar as they are

in the road and under such sun

with their hands over their eyes

and their hands on their foreheads

as if blinded by gleam and fear

and they walk away frightened

by the sunlight and the far-gleaming

sea, by the horizon’s edge and

the sky over and around them

as if in a daylight game.

They seem as if they are born to

stoop over hard-to-read

books and old synaxarions

and over something more precious

than the Arabic topaz and

pearls from Hormuz

https://www.amazon.com/dp/B0D3LP7NW6

Long Listed for the 2023 Griffin Poetry Awards

2023 Longlist Announcement

Ambush

      The sun went down behind the army barracks,

beggars searched for some water however all the water

pitchers in Cana were inverted; women cried as they left

in the yellow dusk, I, haunted, shared my wine with

the robbers and pseudo-martyrs on the hill while

the cross was already biting the edge of my coat.

       Who could I love? To whom should I confess? Only

God can say He heard me complaining, I drank all

the bog they threw at me, my dreams became

the paths onto which triumphant carts rode; I plucked

my wings and gave them to the old, all-alone

woman who was buried with the sparrow under

the neighbour’s tree, in an old pencil case full of ash;

remember me, when the time comes.

      Prisoners’ handiworks were drying by the fireplace.

It was autumn, the fields were deserted, and I heard the steps

of informers who stole the hay. Then I noticed the great

gallows where I was to climb, unknown whether I was

to be crowned king or to roll down to the basket

of the beheaded.

https://www.amazon.com/dp/1926763564

Λευτέρης Πούλιος, Τα περιπλανώμενα φιλιά μας