Trap of the Castaways
I don’t know what happens in the wild high mountains
at night or in the middle of the day. However, I know
all about the mysterious ghosts that live alone on peaks
of deserted hills. I know their habits well and that they
don’t distance themselves from the high places they
have chosen as their residence. How the wanderer who
passes close by or from afar, noon hour or evening,
discerns them, sees them, sometimes fluttering like war
banners, other times taking strange shapes of four pieces
of wood under the cover of a thick layer of dry cypress
branches, like the tents Albanian shepherds put together
like the echo of a flute. Other times they travel on faraway
unexplored seas, on board ancient oil tanks, yet always,
under the Hellenic flag, certainly in memory of the god
Pan. Thus, the simple, natural, logical, and even psychological
result is to leave the factory lights on during the night
and the huge piles of garbage and empty cans in the fields.
Everything in the name of Pan. Yet, the electrical lights
Prove to be useless and only sometimes, here and there,
light wind-stricken seashores, wooden abandoned shacks,
seaweed and petrified bones of the flood animals and
marble busts of emperors and poets.
Manolis Aligizakis 