OR WHEN, suddenly, one turns and looks at you as if you both came to the world for this reason; you don’t talk to each other however his glance again wonders towards the unanswerable from which the holy grace was painfully given to you and other times when you mould a pitcher in your wheel or you write a word in the sand separation already stands between you two and we now know where the man who gets up to leave will finally go, only that he started before us, like the mothers who, if darkness comes, it’s because they were so tired and fell asleep for a while.
Memory Pleats Since many forgotten things lurked in the pleats of memory we all knew the meaning of the forbidden fruit and we followed a blind man as if we needed an errorless guide at the start of the twenty-first century and the man with the severed arm hid behind the robin’s song as if to decipher our thoughts we often sat by our eastern balcony to enjoy the fresh breeze of the August evening as it was obvious that we couldn’t fool the children any longer
THE UNRECOGNIZABLE GIRL Who is the girl all dressed in white and walking down the hillside? As soon as this girl appeared the grass grew tender as flowers and spread its beauty and swayed its tips, in love, pleading not to be forgotten, begging to be stepped upon. Her lips are as pretty and as red as the flowers of the rosary and when dawn turns to daybreak it sends fresh raindrops to her and her glorious yellow hair shines against her breast and her eyes laugh, reflecting the light blue of the sky. Who is the girl who’s dressed in white and walks down the hillside?
II When our cigarettes get close to each other in the night and from their glowing ends you can discern two people who meet and separate the same way from one prison to another from one exile camp to another from one tent to another. Like cicadas when they can’t find trees they climb on telegraph poles we too spread roots wherever we can counting time in weeks, months, seasons. Now we all have little wooden boats which we place next to the books and we send to our relatives we have plates and water glasses — we have nothing, they stole everything from us, we’re left with mud in the mouth. We’re dressed with a soft skin that rips easily. ‘You should had seen Voula after the Liberation, now she’s worn out, work, childbirths, problems with the police” ‘George was preparing his papers to immigrate to the US when they killed him in Chalkida just before the referendum.’ ‘Dinos had it good, I mean, he left everything and now he’s very successful in Canada.’ ‘The floor was giving way under the chest and she struggled to level it. Leave it alone, I said to her, you waste your time. Then one Sunday morning the statuette fell and broke.’ ‘Smoke from the fertilisers plant hanged over the neighborhood, it choked you day and night, the cough wouldn’t abate with all the chemicals.’ And here we remain idle, we fight to survive we sign petitions for peace, mail our complaints we maintain a front line. Yet we don’t live the years, we just count them, we push them away to make sure they go by.
Manolis Aligizakis 