Glorifying Hymn For the Women we Love the women we love are like pomegranates they come and find us during the night when it rains they erase our loneliness with their breasts they dive deep in our hair and decorate it like tears like gleaming shores like pomegranates the women we love are swans their parks live only in our hearts their feathers are the feathers of angels their statues are our bodies the beautiful tree lines are the same as they are on the tips of their toes erect they come near us as if swans kiss us on our eyes the women we love are lakes among their reads their fiery lips whistle our beautiful birds swim in their waters and then when they fly away
Where I Was Born one Could Lose everything In the place I was born one could lose everything. Time eats the words and from inside the words the ravaged eyes are spent even the kisses and the need to suffer.
Unprepared, yes — I can’t do it; I lack that analogy, suitable to the landscape, to the hour, to things and events — no, it’s not faint-heartedness — unprepared before the front step of the deed, totally unprepared before the goal others have set for me. Why others control our fate a little? Why they impose it on us and we accept it? How can they weave our whole year with just a few threads of our moments, usually a rough, dark weaving, thrown over us like a sack covering us from top to bottom, covering all our face and hands, in which we’ve entrusted a knife — completely unfamiliar — which lights all the around landscape, not ours — I know this, not ours. And how our fate happens to accept this, while it pulls away and observes us and our strange fate, as if foreign to us, mute, austere, uninvolved, resigned, not even with the expression of a magnanimity or stoicism, without even disappearing, without dying, we’ll remain a plaything of an alienated fate, not doubting or split in two. There she is, sleepy — with one of her eyes closed and the other dilated letting us see that she observes us and discerns our endless vibrating without approving nor disapproving it. Two different pulls correspond to each of our two legs, one distances itself more and more from the other with wide strides to the point of dismemberment; and the head is a knot that holds together the divided body while, I believe, legs are made to move one at a time, in the same rhythm, to the same direction, down to the plain, next to a bunch of grapes, up to the far away rosy horizon, transferring our body in one piece — or were we perhaps made for that great, unearthly stride over the horrible precipice, over the graves and ours? I don’t know.
Athena II Perplexed Athena gazed at the sea as if to say the balance of the world was based on it: fresh, liberal fountain blessed by the spring like the palms of the beardless poet reverently turned inwards immense sea bearing gifts to my endless wandering when I discovered seeded fields orchards with lemon trees and grapevines ready for the harvest stars gracing rosy-cheeks blue domes of temples each with different armies of words and dreamy images hopeless this misery that I couldn’t escape unless again I evoke Her spirit logistical algorithm Her divine intervention a direction I was meant to follow to the bitter end when finally in the next room they were already enjoying the opened bottle of bubbly
Manolis Aligizakis 