Nikos Engonopoulos – Poems

Dyadic Automation
Careful! Cover yourselves! Be careful! The blowing winds have already brought the mysterious messages to our ears. Everything around us is just another threat. There wasn’t any neighbourhood not blanketed by fear, each object hides a soul inside it. Come, let’s go. The time is now. The rusty weathercock calls us wildly in the night. The draw-well stopped and the blind horses became one with the begonia flowers. Let’s go, march! To go far away to Galvana. The saviour plank is hidden from the wind harbour of forgetfulness, peace is there. Sacrificial victims of love, ascetic wanderers of the night, proud dawn walkers light up the sea lamp. Whoever has the strength, whose heart truly dares, let him come. But let us not delay in futile reviews of the past. The time is uncertain. The roads aren’t safe at all and the flood drenched many places. The Caryatid girls have crowded erotically the dark ditches, the lustful maidens of our erotic years. Their famous smile flew away and now it blooms in some abandoned islands. The thunderbolt shows us the way. Let’s go! To the Lycaonian Galvana, there we shall rest. After our kind foreheads are decorated with rose flowers, we offer the libations due to the birds. There, in the graceful wooden temples of the old capital, we shall slaughter the young bull and a fiery column will spring out from its shed blood. There, wrapped around phallic banners, girls are more beautiful than sudden conclusions of dynamite. There lives the Hellene Pantelas among the wild Soudanese. The flowers there are wise and sunlit leftovers of dead beauties. The tears of the shark and the enigmatic prayer of Zacharia are useless there along with the frosty embrace of the penguin.
The erotic spasms of the last emperors and their fiery tears belong to the same person. The offer of the boatswain to the footprints of the hypotenuse of anomalous attractions is accompanied by the angelic harp, and our imposing stature means the spread of freedom and the longing for freedom all over the globe.

https://www.amazon.com/dp/1926763734

Yannis Ritsos – Poems, Volume V

Performance

Young girls get into the gardens early in the morning

to gather flowers “for the Lord,” they say. Women keep

quiet. “For the Lord”. The gates creak, bells chime. Swallows

oversee things from above. Buses go by the seashore road.

The wooden painted body is laid. He didn’t know what

to say to the questioner. He didn’t want to drink the potion.

They’ll dress him with flowers again, three days and three

nights. Then, people who couldn’t endure it anymore

“He is risen,” they’ll say and go to their daily affairs

with an Epitaphios flower on their lapel, a red egg and

two Easter cookies in their pockets.

https://www.amazon.com/dp/1926763726

Red in Black

Imagination
Absentmindedly I read the label
of the cereal box
and closing my eyes
your face stood before me
your smiling lips
I craved to kiss here along
the isle of the supermarket
you came to keep me company
when my glance left
the cereal box and I thought
I saw you walking
on the other side of the store
when hurriedly and with box in hand
I ran to your apparition
only to find out it was another
woman and I closed my eyes only
to see you here with me again and
with an ironic smile on your lips

https://www.amazon.com/dp/1771713208