Tag: awarded-poet

Nikos Engonopoulos – Poems

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Dyadic Automation
Careful! Cover yourselves! Be careful! The blowing winds have already brought the mysterious messages to our ears. Everything around us is just another threat. There wasn’t any neighbourhood not blanketed by fear, each object hides a soul inside it. Come, let’s go. The time is now. The rusty weathercock calls us wildly in the night. The draw-well stopped and the blind horses became one with the begonia flowers. Let’s go, march! To go far away to Galvana. The saviour plank is hidden from the wind harbour of forgetfulness, peace is there. Sacrificial victims of love, ascetic wanderers of the night, proud dawn walkers light up the sea lamp. Whoever has the strength, whose heart truly dares, let him come. But let us not delay in futile reviews of the past. The time is uncertain. The roads aren’t safe at all and the flood drenched many places. The Caryatid girls have crowded erotically the dark ditches, the lustful maidens of our erotic years. Their famous smile flew away and now it blooms in some abandoned islands. The thunderbolt shows us the way. Let’s go! To the Lycaonian Galvana, there we shall rest. After our kind foreheads are decorated with rose flowers, we offer the libations due to the birds. There, in the graceful wooden temples of the old capital, we shall slaughter the young bull and a fiery column will spring out from its shed blood. There, wrapped around phallic banners, girls are more beautiful than sudden conclusions of dynamite. There lives the Hellene Pantelas among the wild Soudanese. The flowers there are wise and sunlit leftovers of dead beauties. The tears of the shark and the enigmatic prayer of Zacharia are useless there along with the frosty embrace of the penguin.
The erotic spasms of the last emperors and their fiery tears belong to the same person. The offer of the boatswain to the footprints of the hypotenuse of anomalous attractions is accompanied by the angelic harp, and our imposing stature means the spread of freedom and the longing for freedom all over the globe.

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Yannis Ritsos – Poems, Volume II

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THE BRIDGE (excerpt)

Our humble needs don’t humiliate us;

on the contrary, they save us; they give us ground

to walk on again, to stand erect, to work, and

their knowledge and approval is our brotherhood,

it’s the beginning of our profound freedom,

it’s that sacred truthfulness,

the first and last truthfulness of man, so much so

that you could cry out of tenderness,

for this confession of yours, for this humiliation,

for this pride with which you were born and will die,

for this work that was caused by these needs of yours

that it will be offered to the needs of others,

to the eternal needs of man, an eternal commitment.

I always come back to you, and it’s my great joy to know

that you await for me, to know about your beautiful

patience and your deep trust. Allow me then to repeat

the articles of your faith with the simplicity of the novice,

with that sweet enthusiasm of the young proselyte who

recites off by heart the articles of life written in large

red letters

on the façade of history and the horizon:

I believe that the first step to progress is the correct

distribution of bread,

I believe that the first step to progress is the increase in

the production of bread for all

I believe that our first duty is peace,

I believe that our first freedom isn’t our loneliness

but our comradeship; as for the rest, there will always

be time for them too, but only from there on.

It was about this bridge that I wanted to talk to you —

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