Tag: human-condition

Constantine Cavafy

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If and Since He Had Died
“Where did he retire? Where did the Sage disappear to?
After his countless miracles,
and the fame of his teaching
that spread over so many nations
he suddenly hid, and no one learned
with certainty what happened to him
(nor has anyone ever seen his grave).
Some said that he died in Ephesus.
But Damis didn’t record it; nothing was written
by Damis about the death of Apollonios.
Others said that he vanished in Lindos.
Or perhaps the story
that he ascended in Crete is true,
at the sacred temple of Dictynna.
However, we have his exquisite,
supernatural appearance
to a young student in Tyana.
Perhaps the time has not come for him to return
and appear to the world again,
or perhaps he is roaming among us
incognito. But he will reappear
as he was, teaching the right things, and then of course
he will reestablish the worship of our gods,
and our refined Hellenic ceremonies.”
This was the way he mused in his poor house,
one of a few pagans,
one of the very few who remained
after reading Philostratos’
On Apollonios of Tyana—
In any case, an insignificant
and timid man, on the surface
he played the Christian, and he, too, went to church.
It was the era when in utmost piety
the king who reigned was the aged Ioustinos,
and Alexandria, a god-fearing city,
abhorred the miserable idolaters. On the Ship
Certainly, this small sketch,
in pencil resembles him.
Done rather fast, on the deck of the ship,
one enchanting afternoon.
The Ionian Pelagos all around us.
It resembles him. However, I recall him as handsome.
He was sensitive to the point of suffering,
and this lit his expression.
He appears even handsome to me
now that my soul recalls him out of Time.
Out of Time. All these things are old,
the drawing, the ship, and the afternoon.

https://draft2digital.com/book/3562856

https://www.amazon.com/dp/1926763823

Tasos Livaditis – Poems, Volume II

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Long-listed for the 2023 Griffin Poetry Awards

2023 Longlist Announcement

DEVIL WITH THE CANDLE STICK

“One day you will remember of me”, he said “but you won’t
be able to cry;”
what did he mean and what was the meaning of words?
Women stood at the crossroad, dark faced, holding the
half open pomegranate
like thousand faces of nothing. The prostitute, returning
home, went to the kitchen and warmed the food and I,
hell, failed between two evening songs.
When Rosa had a john she used to place a carton on
the corner so the memory of her father wouldn’t see her;
someone, with an axe, came out in the night and started
striking blindly.
The whole city was panicking, searches, interrogations,
occasionally someone would come, kneel before the icons
and confess to everything
since the beginning of the world — thus perhaps seeking
a purpose or two lines in the newspaper and a small
rose at the edge of the road;
the stupid child would go by and pick the rose, he’d look
at it and then as if
he understood something he’d leave it in its place and only
the gambler could guess that movement such as those that
save you.
Thus one by one they all got lost and I was the only survivor
playing, at the critical moment, with the fringes
of the tablecloth.
I truly wonder why all these since one can be lost with
a lot less things.
I remember one who’s hunger pushed him to desire a street
organ, which he sat down and ate, there, at the corner
only spitting out the crutch of the soldier, and the fat ugly
woman had revealed her big breasts over the balcony
“don’t feel sorry for me” she said “I’m very clever” and
she was staring at the end of the road;
then we sat on the grass of the dark cemetery and helped
the dead child.

https://draft2digital.com/book/4051627

https://www.amazon.com/dp/1926763564

George Seferis – Collected Poems

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…shrinking, yet unable to vanish completely. I don’t know what I have to say or what I have to do. Sometimes this obstacle appears to me as though a tear drop flopped on a music composition that will keep it silent until it dissolves. And I have the unbearable feeling that all the rest of my life won’t be sufficient to dissolve this tear drop in my soul. And a thought haunts me that if I were to be burned alive this obstinate moment would be the last to surrender.
Who would help us? Once, when I was still a seaman, one July noon, I found myself alone on an island, crippled in the sun. A soothing breeze brought to my mind tender thoughts, it was then when a young woman with a diaphanous dress revealing her body lines slender and willing like a gazelle’s and a somber man who stared in her eyes from a yard away, came and sat not far from where I was. They spoke a language I couldn’t understand. She called him Jim. But their words had no weight and their glances, mingled and motionless, left their eyes blind. I always think of them, because they were the only people I saw that didn’t have the grasping or haunted look that I noticed on everybody else. That look that makes them resemble either a pack of wolves or a flock of sheep. I met them again the same day in one of those island chapels that one finds as he goes by and loses them as he walks out. They still kept the same distance from each other, then they came together and kissed. The woman turned into a cloudy image that disappeared as she was of small stature. I asked myself whether they knew that they escaped from the world’s nets…
It is time for me to go. I know of a pine tree that leans near the sea. At noon, it bestows a shade upon a tired body and at night, as the wind passes through its needles it starts a strange song, like souls that have abolished death at the moment when they start becoming lips and skin. Once I spent a night under such a tree. At dawn I was as fresh as if they’d just cut me off the quarry.
Ah, if one could live like this, irrelevant.

https://www.amazon.com/dp/B096TTS37J

Nikos Engonopoulos – Poems

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Reality
The ship entered the αρεα of the thick fog. A bell
echoes desperately at prow: the route is full of
innumerable dangers now. On the bridge, however,
the sleepless and bewildered captain watches and
drives the ship safely. The captain … his eyes, his
glance. Yes, indeed, his glance is everything, like
now that his glance, straight, strong, mercilessly
pierces through the thick layers of grey pleats of fog
and inside the dark paths of the human psyche, into
the dark sanctuary of Fate, it calms the wildest and
roughest seas, it enters and stands like a guard into
the hovel of the poor fisherman, it saunters tenderly
around the anchors, the sleeping baby, the spread nets
and finally, it comes, settles and serenely rests, next
to the quiet light of the lamp. Certainly, the captain’s
profession isn’t captain. He has different choices,
different longings, and specialties. Different things
attract him and in different things he’s involved. Yet,
when the ship is in danger, they all run to him, who
although they don’t see him as a man, they allot to him
and he accepts the responsibility of many souls. He,
who has no joy but knows of it, who isn’t free, yet
yearns for freedom and struggles while he hopes.
Let it be known: if the Fates never visited his baby
cradle, Fates, Witches and pure Fairies would come
next to his deathbed. The figurehead of the ship
knows all this and loves him. She’s, his lover. This
wild and hot girl with her undone black hair, fiery
red lips and the light-blue belt goes and finds him
secretly every night and they make love ‘together’
and chit-chat erotically for hours. One moonlit night:
“Don’t forget me”, she says to him, “because I’ll die”
One day when he was in a thick forest, rain caught up
with him. He sheltered himself in the tree hollow and
waited. The rain intensified. Among all the rain he
noticed a few tree trunks burned by the fires of
wayfarers and many pinecones scattered around the soil.
Another time, a summer noon, he stood by a water well.
Further away was a tower. A girl came, like Rebeckah
to get some water. She puts the pitcher down, goes close
to him, uncovers her voluptuous breasts and says, “Don’t
touch them, they are roses and drop their petals; only
caress them” Then again, “No, do as you wish with them,
they are yours, my sweet man, I gift them to you.” This
woman, who he fell in love with passionately, one night as
the winds were blowing, he waited for her and he saw
her going down to the harbour. She ran and cried along
the deserted quay. She had tied her raincoat around her
waist with a leather strap and the strong wind sometimes
glued it on her body and other times it whipped her apron
wildly and took away along with her voice, her long
hair too.

https://draft2digital.com/book/3744799

https://www.amazon.com/dp/1926763734

Yannis Ritsos – Poems, Volume III

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14th of November
As we focus our eyes to notice a difference
among the pieces of day, we don’t know how to get
a hold of ourselves, we miss the shape, the hour, colors,
faces. We only listen carefully so that we might
discern a sound that confirms the passing of time,
so we can reverse the performance, box, broom handle,
name, the dice that roll on the table,
the limping wind that stumbles onto the barbwire
the fork that hits the plate and its sound that continues
internally.
Otherwise a circle without a center remains, a whirl
in the air with no movement but its own;
it can’t become a car tire that crosses a forest
and if once it becomes a square
it’s not a window through which you look at the world
or the three lined carpentries in an unfamiliar
neighborhood,
but only the relativity of straight lines, the analogy of corners,
boring, very boring things. A mathematician and
an astronomer could create something concrete and
clear out of all these.
I can’t. Yet I always liked the Observatories; the dark
stairway, the clock, the telescope, those photographs
of stars in homely positions: Orion without his sword,
with no underwear, Verenice with her many freckles,
unwashed, frumpy, a whole urban kitchen
transferred to a metaphysical location, boiling cups,
jugs, casseroles, the grater, salt cellar, baking tins,
white spots, a bit of steam hanging onto the smoked
walls of the night.
Someone was talking of numbers and more numbers,
light-eons, leagues and leagues. I wasn’t listening.
Today a friend was telling me that when he was thirteen
he was selling oranges and lemons in Piraeus;
he also had a young Armenian friend who was selling
socks. During the summer afternoons they’d meet in the
harbour behind a pile of sacks, where they’d put down
their baskets and read poems; then they’d eat a sesame
bread ring and an orange and gaze at the sea, the jumping
fish, the foreign ships.
From today I also have a friend who smells of orange
and harbour. He keeps many evening whistles of ships
in his pockets. I see the movement of the big finger
of the big harbour clock on his hands. From today on,
I’ll love him, I’ll unbutton one of his coat buttons.
Now I think of going to find his young Armenian friend
to find a basket with socks on the road, to cry out, socks,
beautiful socks, cheap socks. At noon, I’m sure I’ll find
the Armenian youth behind the sacks, I’ll get to know him;
he’ll recognize me since we both have the traces of our
common friend’s eyes on the lips. If I missed that
basket with the socks and the one with the lemons I
wouldn’t know how to fill my day, my words,
my silence.
Yet I believe every comrade wishes to have such a basket,
only that I don’t know where to find it and I get angry and
I search.

https://www.amazon.com/dp/B096TLBNFK

Yannis Ritsos – Poems, Volume II

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A Little Sleep
The distant voice of the lottery vendor. The swaying of the tree.
A canteen steadied in the sand.
The west is burning. A purple reflection over the seashore.
The few houses painted crimson, silence and sundown.
You have a summer handkerchief in your pocket,
a sorrow you left behind on the ledge
like the ripped shoe of the spring that was left on
the rock
when the last group grabbed three meters of sea
and left stooping among the tents of the wind.
How fast the sun goes down in your eyes;
your coat is already smelling of moist,
you put your hands in your gloves like the trees
get in the clouds.
Where the tempest stops your glance is re-ignited
where the sky ends your song and your whole face
are reborn.
There is a yellow star in your silence
like a small daisy on the side table of the sick man
a little warmth on every yellow leaf that turns
the pages of time backward.
It is enough that you know. The other communication
doesn’t end at midnight.
The line is continued from deep inside and from afar
with a few stops, interruptions, accidents,
it continues
and autumn finds shelter on the railings of the station
or the fence wall of the Orphanage,
it listens to the call for silence on the damp roofs and
to the gramophone of the seashore bar,
that the moon turns,
a scratched vinyl, a very old tango. No one dances.
But you, turning the moon to its other side,
beyond midnight, further from the ledge,
you listen to the great music while you saunter
in the harbour with the twelve boat masts
like a speechless restaurant server who cleans
the autumnal tables
folding carefully the napkins of the night,
gathering the stack of plates with the leftover
fish bones.
The sea and the songs continue.
All these that the locked people left outside
belong to us:
the hurrah of the wind in the darkened rooms,
the music that descends in big waves and hits
the window shutters,
the silence that opens its purse and looks at itself
in her square little mirror,
and the woman who wraps herself with the army blanket
and sleeps next to her bag
and you too, as you light your cigarette with a star
over the calm plain of your soul
like the guard who stays vigil over the sleeping soldiers
and thinks of his woman
of the sea
the city with the flags
the trumpets
the sun-dust and the glory of men.
And next to you, you know it,
this big smile
like the circular alarm clock next to the asleep worker.
It’s time to sleep a little. Don’t be afraid.
The clock is properly wound up. It’ll get you up on time
with the bucket of dawn that draws water from the well,
with the crawl of a proclamation that noiselessly sheds
light under the door of your silence. Be assured.
It’ll wake you up.

https://draft2digital.com/book/3562968

https://www.amazon.com/dp/B0851M9LTV

Hours of the Stars

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Sirius
We saw her unfold the spin wheel of time
opposite the wind
and the pashas we saw
the beak of day touching her sun tied
on the iron stake of a rock and the eagle
coupled her sides. There she armed herself
while each of her gods stood forty yards high and
started talking to children and geraniums
at times even men got teary. Then you would think
they tossed barley into the fire or dice
on the chess of virgin Mary as
time takes away time and brings back
her sea-kerchiefs and the vigils of the north wind.
Time unfurls the flutes of colors and
the blouses of girls that into their eyes
convoys of birds and flowers travel.
At the lower levels the olive tree leaves
embitter us and at the higher level
pines breath signals a shiver
of guilt sprouting on her skin and platoons
of cypresses climb up the hill
as the hours start to blaze she offers
atonement libations to the fair weather; she assumes
the ephebe July and establishes the new crops like Aeneias
white horses thresh Logos and the golden plains
from end to end
fever spreads into her veins for hours and hours
like weather does to grapevines
that the performance of a group of disorder
appears straight by the edge of the precipice.
The hours stagger on their red heels and on their faces
intensifies the blushing aroused by their hearing
focused on the far away when silence
announces inexplicable oracles and
truth demands ransom as
years go by she becomes an orphan and
hangs over the waters when she seeks to
blindly attach herself onto something as
the camel driver gets fooled by the mirage
of the desert and assumes seeing far away
the sword of Alexander the Great pushed
into the scabbard of the Dead Sea.
We saw her floating over waters and ruins
like a big star when the mermaid
rejoiced in tearing up the forgetfulness
of the sea floor and during the night
Glaucus fought against the hours striking
them one by one over the castle of Astropalia
and the bell of Virgin Mary.

https://www.amazon.com/dp/1926763408