THE DEAD HOUSE
Yes, the servant girls knew this stairway well
after living in this house for many years, yet
they uncovered their faces and looked at it,
they turned and looked behind them
to make sure they hadn’t been seen, then they
covered their faces and hands again and they left:
small, black, dirty, stooping, like black stigmata,
like flies during a malaria, under the stony rain
of the colonnade and the big broom was left
inverted behind the kitchen door, like
a nightmare with raised hair that couldn’t scream.
Everyone has left us.
We brought foreign cleaning women to clean
the stairway, and the marble floors, to clean them well.
Soon the marbles sweated out blood again. The cleaners
left too. They deserted us; so, we forgot about
everything too: sweeping, mopping, dusting and
the marble kept on sweating out more and more blood.
A red river flowed in and out of our house; we
stayed away from people; soon people forgot
all about us too; they weren’t afraid of us anymore.
We weren’t scared of them.
Manolis Aligizakis 