Poetry the Noble Grave Poetry offers a fine funeral to its beloved dead with official tunes and mythic splendor it buries them deep, salutes with music dedicates wreaths, a cold grave slab the endless procession behind the verse all the sepulchral History above them. The palms of angel seal their silence until their Second Coming when the dead will shake the gravestone and move the moist body to harvest our ripened life leaving behind the borderless homeland. Our dead hope to be resurrected and wrap their arms around our necks with their great strength and rigor. Avengers, tyrant killers will choke us.
…made and she could not take a chance on hurting them by refusing their generous offer. It was kind of them to even think of an engagement gift, but she wished they had decided on something less ostentatious. Oh well, maybe if it was a small, inexpensive car she wouldn’t feel so bad about accepting it. She had not told her parents. She did not want them to feel they had to give the newly engaged couple a gift. Such a thing had never entered her mind, and she hoped Cam did not expect it either. And anyway, her parents certainly could not afford anything as lavish as a car. Maybe I’m out of my league, Tyne thought. We’re just simple country people. I shouldn’t be marrying someone like Cam. This new revelation made her uneasy, taking the edge off the excitement she felt about returning to the city. She turned to look out the window onto the bleak winter landscape, but a little girl in the seat beside her suddenly caught her attention and offered a welcome diversion for her thoughts. The blond-haired child held up a story book and asked her a word. “That says hospital,” Tyne replied, smiling into the innocent face. Noting the pictures in the book, she asked, “Is your story about a nurse?” The child beamed. “Yeth. When I grow up, I’m going to be a nurth.” “Are you? That’s lovely. I’m a nurse, and I work in a hospital like that one in your picture book.” The little face turned up, the blue eyes wide and incredulous. “Oh … oh, you’re a nurth … oh.” Tyne laughed softly, and could not resist the urge to put her arm around the little one and hug her. Looking up, she saw the warm smile of a young woman sitting across from them. “You’ve made her day, thank you,” the woman said, smiling. “Are you her mother? Oh then, I’ll trade places with you so that you can sit with her.” “No, no,” the mother waved her hand. “She wouldn’t thank me for that.” Tyne laughed and turned back to the admiring child. Someday, would she and Cam have a little girl like this dear one? A girl who wanted, more than anything, to be a nurth?
Ah, I’d like to kiss the hands of your father, the knees of your mother who gave birth to you for me. I’d like to kiss all the chairs you touched with your dress as you walked by to hide in my heart, like a charm, a piece of the bed sheet you slept in. I could even smile to the man who saw you naked before me to even smile at him, who was graced with such happiness. Because I, my beloved, I owe you something more than love I owe you the song and the hope, the tears and again hope. In the tiniest moment with you, I lived all my life.
…lavishing her body, erotic and desirous, promising and promiscuous; Mona, the nurse who came to replace his gauzes. Mona, a woman, came to the help of a man desiring nothing more than what nature has allotted to him: lust, even with his half-severed penis, a man desires to ride on top of a woman’s body, this woman’s, Mona’s. In this war zone, man never stopped longing for that exquisite moment of coupling, nature’s first and most powerful expression: a man, an injured man, coupling an eloquent, musical, poetic, female body. His eyes still closed, he saw himself on a bed where he was battling his last, three days and three nights, with his stressed breath in irregular spasms of a living-dead man, skinny, leftover of stamina recluse in his austere village bed. Shadow of a man left to perish as nature commanded, yet, his last breath was delayed as for three long days and three long nights, he kept on gasping for air unable to release his soul to his creator while from time to time he would whisper in his so ever weak voice one word, “pussy” to the amazement of his relatives, especially to his two sons who didn’t know how to play out their father’s last wish. And the night arrived again for the fourth time, and the owls sang their lonely songs in the nearby barn while the moon kept on playing hide and seek behind the clouds, while the unrested soul of the old man repeated the same double syllable word, “pussy”. Indeed, it was tragic and comical for the three relatives who stayed for the vigil: one of his sons, the old man’s niece, and the servant girl who attended to the wishes of the almost-dead man. Not any special wishes did the moribund man have other than perhaps stir him from time to time to check whether he was still on the upper stratum, although his occasional whisper, “pussy” was witness to the fact. At the desperate moment of ambivalence when no one of the three knew what to do to help the old man relax and let his soul be released to the elements, Mona, the twenty-four year old maid with her flaming eyes and promiscuously half-open lips and her voluptuous breasts, an angel of mercy nonetheless, neared the bed of the old man, raised her skirt, took his fragile hand and placed it behind her light undergarment and between her legs upon which time and upon feeling the touch of his…
Manolis Aligizakis 