Long-listed for the 2023 Griffin Poetry Awards
…as if all gestures existed in a different world
and the distant memory of them reached here
and it’s strange how untrue the most real things
look sometimes
ah mother when you gave birth to me
you should had given birth to a rock
as now that I have grown
please count all my struggles
and her voice resembled the night, when one walks
alone and only the frost of the unstoppable winter
comes to meet him
and the lights mark the length of an unknown road.
And no one waits for you. And you wait for no one.
For a moment the man stood on the first step before
he climbed up;
he resembled a deserted mausoleum of a hero who
was once loved, believed in, praised with song
and frightened
until what ripens the wheat ears and wilts Eros
and crowns patience
and as a guide of the universe leads each of us to
our proper place,
time, the just time suddenly undressed him of all
his glory and grace, songs and fright
and threw him in the middle of contempt, all alone
and crashed and miserable
and totally humane.
Manolis Aligizakis 