TRANSLATING THE END OF LIFE TO EROS

Since I can’t touch you

with my tongue

I transliterate my passion.

I can’t take you as communion

and I denature you

I can’t undress you

and I dress you with imagination

of an allophone language.

I can’t cuddle under your wings

and I fly around you turning

the pages of your vocabulary. 

I want to know how you denude

yourself, how you are reborn

and for this I search for

your habits between your lines

the fruits you love

the smells you prefer

the girls you read as if turning pages.

I’ll never see your nude signs

so I work hard on your adjectives

that I recite them in an allophone language.

Yet my story became too old

my tome doesn’t adorn any shelf

and now I imagine you leather-bound

in a foreigner’s bookcase.

Since it was never allowed

to let myself in the nonsense of nostalgia

and write this poem, I read

the gray sky in a sunlit translation.

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Σταύρος Βαβούρης, Η Κλυταιμνήστρα στην Αυλίδα

Long Listed for the 2023 Griffin Poetry Awards

2023 Longlist Announcement

Now

pieces of the great incomparable dream we

once held

are taken away from us

warm parts of lost glories

wedged in our nails, go rotten, our hands swell,

hurt; they steal them from us while we sleep,

to the arms…

and we sang all together, hoped all together

and fell all together

the squares were full of gestures and visions

as we kneeled over our dead, you could say,

a piece of the earth was sinking, the coffins

floated in the air raised up by the sudden

wind of our songs;

to the arms…

And the defeated soldiers walked along

the indifferent roads, children put their tongues out

while the soldiers laughed for a moment

a vague distant laughter, as if they see for

the first time how beautiful life is.

Or sometimes, burdensome, they lift a stone

and throw it far away

in the space to the direction that perhaps Fate

passes. And they keep on walking in the spring

warmish light taking off their boots, their bags,

their clothes and staying naked,

full of lice, silence and lunacy of continuance

             inside them.

The defeated soldiers, the defeated soldiers

have the sorrow of immenseness.

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Δημητρός Ζαχαριάδης – Τὸ ἔργον τοῦ Νίτσε

THE BRIDGE

Indeed, the halves of the hour are strange; especially for

           those who are asleep

and have lost count of time; and more so for those who

are awake and count. The half hours maintain that

vague half that seeks its supplement and are conscious

of being half; and they’re conscious of the vague

other half, in the previous or the after, always in

            the beyond and the outside;

strange, indeed are the half hours — they’re a suspended

perhaps loud 1 ½, 2 ½, 3 1/2 . Perhaps, and a perhaps

that sounds like a slash in the wholeness of time,

a sensitive, metallic pulse; a vibration like the thin blade

of a stiletto thrust in the middle of a bull’s forehead

like that sharp knife which whizzing through the dark

void is nailed in a closed door. 

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Routine

Often you said we needed

to change our habits

a new beginning to commence

a new purpose to seek

help to discover hope

and its elements

while all along

you remained resting

in lush recliner

and always you upheld

your beliefs while

tightly in hand

you held

the recliner’s lever

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Aristoxenus (c.375-335 BCE)…

OBSTACLES

As you get to know me I raise another wall.

It’s not that I don’t want you to find out who I am

it’s not that I want to drive you off.

We only have to understand clearly

how many obstacles we can go over

so that we’ll meet again.

We have to find out how far our endurance can last;

Then, don’t forget that perhaps I don’t

put up the obstacles in front of us, but they exist

on me and inside of me like black scars

that change my shape and my color:

the obstacle of myself against myself.

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Το έπος του Γκιλγκαμές

Dancer

The dancer recoiled his body like a spring and inscribed

beautiful lines in the void as if teaching it the meaning

of love. The statue remained motionless, impossible

to recoil in its marble robe. Beggars knew every corner

of the big city, the bricks and mortar, lack of compassion

was already felt from the flight path of the pigeons while

children taught their teachers to skip rope and fairy-tales

they learned on TV: Aesop’s fables retold, reused, recycled,

words re-evaluated. Eyes of the children witnesses of myths

not yet narrated and the dancer recoiled his body like a spring

that inscribed the beautiful line: I love you. Once I was told

to love and finally it came to me that misery was all

I had inherited.

I like those who like their lives and they always give it

away as a gift.

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