Crickets
The house is full of crickets
ticking like clocks out of rhythm
out of breath. And the years
that we live tick the same way
while they just keep silent
as though they had nothing to say.
Once in Pelion I heard them
digging a cave hastily
in the night. But now
we have turned the leaf of fate
and we’ve met you and you’ve met us
from the hyperboreans to
the negroes by the equator
who have bodies without mind
and who cry when they hurt.
And I hurt and you hurt
but we don’t cry, we don’t
even whisper, because
the machine is speeding
before horror and contempt
before death and life,
the house is full of crickets.
Manolis Aligizakis 