Song
I walked all around your house (the moth flew
around the lamp until it met its sweet death) though
you didn’t come out that I’d burn into the flame of your eyes.
Alas, the fragrance of the body and of the soul
contamination will spoil one night
even more alas since I won’t be the spoiler.
Flowers of the rock before the green sea
with veins that reminded me of other loves
gleaming in the slow drizzle
flowers of the rock, faces
that came when none spoke and spoke to me
that they let me touch them after the silence
among pine trees, oleanders and plane trees.
Long-listed for the 2023 Griffin Poetry Awards
a barren woman who cries by the door, sniffing in
her snot,
just to hear a child, until a small tiny star takes my
last argument away
that the world isn’t nice at all.
When I finally decided to start it was already late.
All Homeric adventures were sang many years ago
only a few flashlights with their yellow light were left
and the nostalgia of a world beyond this world. I
of course tried to familiarize myself plucking poultry
or sitting on the toilet with the rats where I used to die
a little at a time
an impossible thing since each time they rang the bell
I always appeared in front of them, a corpse full
of life;
then I took after the fly and its daily chores or someone
who killed and after he went to eat at the restaurant,
having a letter in his pocket, the letter with the divine
confession that no one ever received.
Another time I’ll narrate to you about the witness who
was very thirsty in the desert, they say, until he died
in order to write his name in the water.
excerpt
these voices of the innumerable people, pagans as they were called,
the ones who had died under the knife of the first Christians, who
exterminated thousands and thousands, as the scholars claimed,
perhaps even millions, to establish the new religion? It was written
in certain books, not of course in the regular books taught in
schools, that millions of Hellenes were eliminated so Christianity
could spread over the lands, and perhaps these voices and groans
Hermes was hearing coming from the depths of the earth were none
other than the pain those millions of Hellenes suffered.
He stood motionless as if to listen to a discourse coming from
somewhere deep under the floor of the monastery, groans of people
killed and buried under the soil of this church, when unexpectedly
a thought came to him: did the purpose justified the means when a
man is condemned to death for the success of a movement, did the
death of a man in the hands of another was rightfully approved by the
system which always craves to retain power over the people? And what
about the killing of a brother by brother, only for the killer to gain the
approval and help of a superior? Such thoughts overtook Hermes to
the point of feeling sick, indeed he felt the need to run away, far away
from this place, which he had visited with all the positive intentions of
looking into the monastery correspondence. He felt suffocated. He put
the papers away, he walked out of the church, he didn’t stop to thank
the monk who helped him, he just walked out at a fast pace as if to distance
himself from voices and images he wanted to forget.
Then, when far out, he felt his heart had calmed down as he
climbed a short hill since he wanted to change his route and followed
a narrow trail towards the top of the hill to reach his village on the
other side. He surely felt a lot better, and quite unexpectedly, a tune
rose from within his essence to his lips, and he started singing a local
tune; soon, he reached the top of the hill and found an old man on a
donkey right ahead of him. He greeted him and then asked,
“Are there any partridges around here, Uncle?”
“I have seen a couple of flocks over that mountain,” the old man
pointed to the other side of the horizon.
Manolis Aligizakis 