Orestes
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.
Manolis Aligizakis 