Poetry by Dimitris Liantinis, Translated by Manolis Aligizakis
ISBN 978-926763-41-5, Libros Libertad, June 2015, $18.00

 

Eagle

There may be a way to bend
the insistence of chained Nostos
to rush with light and decipher
the slant passages and
unguarded borders of the by-chance clouds
to log with light
the slopes and counties on rocky mountains
of the dear stalker and the wild animals.
No less number of fir-trees;
with new paeans and drums of war the echoes
won’t refuse to come and help
the silence function
until drop by drop they’ll
turn the height into immortal as
at the Monastery of Dochiarios
the difficult will become easy
while the sweat moral of colours
will avenge the malice of the rocks.
An angry horse
threshes the horizon
like the punisher Achilles with the wound
with golden spears and
shiny nails
the fire of lightning is sharpened

 

Capricorn

Here the heavenly horns of the sea hunted the goats
and the four-fold snout of the night rattled
inflaming the tentacles of deep sea
broken branches of the southwestern wind and sirocco
and in the middle that tree
of Abessalom.
Here the tropic craters shone
burning the forests of exalted reefs and
slicing the bread of the fog at midnight
months cross-legged
yellow chasms and red-golden cracks
smell of sulphur. The light is out.
Here we sat and lamented the leadership
and domesticated animals of old days.
Oh, uncalculated turn, geometric order
where we’ve lived under full sail listening to fairy tales and
the nightingale songs of water mills
where we’ve lived page by page counting the immovable mountains
or retaining the lecythus of calm
amidst the loose hair of the Aegean horn
during the third century of the glaucus dynasty
with signalmen surveying the map of the tempest
at the gateless foreheads
the sun strikes the quarries of green
like a wing over the ancient neighborhood
with canaries on the garden fence.
How have we lived?