English

Mediterranean

Gazing across the coast, to the very point where the land becomes sea and the sea horizon. The Mediterranean surges in my lips. I’m trying to define it with metaphors of sun, wind, sand and water, with images reformed into myths, to envision it with the ingredients of life, in the language of each country that swims across its coasts, amidst the sound of unforgettable songs traveling through its waters: “... it gave birth to Gods, Christ himself; the summer there has no fear of time… in the Mediterranean …”.

The afternoon brought closer the bow of the sky with all its colors. After the waves had recoiled toward the sea, the moon’s halo mirrored itself into the troubled waters amidst clusters of stars. On the horizon, within the span of moving time, the ships followed the age-long trajectory of the winds from Egypt and Phoenicia to the ports of Cyprus and Greece, carrying civilizations, submitting to the present an everlasting collateral.

I dig beneath the steps of Poseidon to unbury the universe of this moment. But the sand is delusive and dominant like love, enclosing devoutness within. And after thousands of years, through the fingers of times, emerge naked bodies and statues, old ships, amphorae, masts, robes, hulls and trawls, collecting the ashes of floating life before it evaporates, and rises like a cloud in the air.

But what is the Mediterranean? What are the waves, the sun, the wind and its whims? Amidst carved rocks I listen to the echo of the sea surfacing across its estuaries, grasping onto the land. It is an erotic, imperishable echo that reverberates without ending…the subconscious relation of the water with earth. Grasping and holding onto the land. Because the Mediterranean is a lake in the belly of the Earth; its very loneliness, ever so immense and humid…

translation: Despina Pirketti

In Münster

I lie on the grass
extending the universe with my eyes
extending the sky, the clouds, the shadows
the moist silence of the lake
The birds are playing the piano on the keys of the trees
The wind blows over the surface of things
quickly turns the atlas round and the countries take flight
>and the world spins in a roller coaster
howling

I want to inscribe my existence on the margins
of this world
before the dawn sheds its skin to become a snake;
to sign my sentence
for the things I didn’t have the time
before my hair bled into an old woman’s hair

I want to eat bread kneaded with darkness
a few grey clouds and fragile moments
baked in the microwave oven
fast and unhealthy

Bread for a strong stomach
to withstand the bare walls
of our time

Translated by Despina Pirketti

LONDON: THREE STOPS

Contemporary Helen

At the British Museum they assured me
that Troy did exist
and Paris did exist, Helen too
and all the Greeks that fought in Troy
and those who came back,
Odysseus and the sirens
in the innermost part of his mind
and Helen?
Helen returned with the legend, the memory,
with that fragment of history that became legend
and she lingers in memory
she is written and rewritten
sung and hated
she lingers alive as a name
as a dream, a vision
Helen, eternally alive
eternally young and beautiful
the innocent mistress that aroused Paris
and war broke out

Helen,
desired by all men
despised by all women
Helen of Seferis and of all the poets
Helen – you, me, her, all of us

Paris is lurking around
and a war, perhaps…

Translated by Despina Pirketti

ΙΙ

Contemporary Aphrodite

The statues of the Gods
were piled up in passageways
He guided me between them
showed me Zeus, Apollo, Poseidon
stood in front of Athena “I admire her wisdom”
and Aphrodite “I love her half missing breast,
her amputated arm, her broken voice”

Later at a mall I passed by
another Aphrodite
She looked vexed, exhausted
through the voices and the throng
I remembered Aphrodite at the Museum
a silent mistress
letting tourists take selfies with her
touch her tender marble legs
her amputated hand
the half missing breast

For a moment I thought I saw her sighing
and a spasm falling on the floor
that trampled down
and no one took notice

Translated by Despina Pirketti

ΙΙΙ

To the women of Syria

At the British Museum I met the Achaeans
Agamemnon before he sacrificed Iphigenia,
Clytemnestra, as fair as her sister, Helen,
Achilles, and Helen herself, already taken
by Paris; an aristocratic armour

I met an aged Homer
crouching on the Iliad
his curly white beard
dripping sweat

And a young Virgil
hearkening to death’s whisper in his ear:
“Live, I won’t be long!”

A vehicle led me to Troy
the city set ablaze
its convex walls engulfed by smoke
and the Trojan women gasping in the streets
grieving their sons and rending their garments
their voices mingled with those of the women in Syria
their grief the same
a dried up sea.

Translated by Despina Pirketti

LILY MICHAELIDES, A TENDER STORY

Moment, detached from time…

It was Thursday afternoon, late November in 2004. I stepped into the gallery and focused my eyes on each of the photographs of the exhibition, observing closely. I felt a bead of sweat crossing my chest, a bead of upset cold sweat. Then, I chanced upon it.

I took two or three steps forward and stood in front of the photograph without thinking. I merely looked on, looked at the faces, one moment at the woman, the next moment at the girl she held in her arms. Yes, the gallery owner was right when she called me: “…It looks like you and your mother are in one of the photographs…” The woman was my mother and the little girl in her embrace was me, either one or one and a half years old. My mother’s eyes were forlorn, dropped as though from guilt, not over something she herself had done but over something done to her. That year my father had left the house to go to work and he never came back. Abandonment, loneliness, the small-town society, a baby in her arms and pregnant again, made her keep her gaze constantly lowered. I unglued my eyes from them, closed them while retaining the moisture, I didn’t want to let the tears blur the image, and felt my chest fluttering. I collapsed on the first seat my hands tapped at and softly leaned my head on his back.

It must have been a workday, sometime between 1957-1960, surely not a summer’s day because the figures are dressed in woolen clothes, and small ponds along the street edges bespeak a recent rain. The photographer had toured the villages of Troodos and, on his way down, he traveled through Galata, a village in the Solea valley, built between mountain slopes, severed in two by the river Clarios, this or that side of the river was the villagers’ reference point in demarcating the old neighborhoods from the new ones…

I got up and again stood in front of the photograph. Perhaps, I thought to myself, if I tried, I could climb up to that wooden balcony; but I didn’t seriously mean it, I didn’t even give it a second thought, it just crossed my mind as I was taking another look at the photograph hanging on the back of the gallery’s left wall. I remembered the balcony from years ago; a balcony with children sitting on the edge, their legs dangling in the air; now washed linen hang to dry. The sheets hung low, if someone raises their hands, they can reach them, they can drag them down to the street… but why should they? these are thoughts we had as children to spite and upset the grownups… The stone fountain in the village, at the time when running water was not available in houses; next to it, the coffee shop, strictly for men, mostly the elderly; a daring old woman and invisible death sit with them, taking in the sun; a boy stands a bit further down and the priest bows over the fountain to drink water from the palms of his hands; he will sit down for a coffee and declaim the news of the week from the newspaper.

My mother too; she woke up early, grabbed the leather market bag and, dressed in her home clothes, slippers, apron around her waist, she took the child in her arms and went to the grocer’s. At that specific moment she was returning home. And right there, at the point where she would turn left toward the river, the photographer pulled her inside the lens. He stopped time and placed her within the frame of his photograph. She had no idea about that morning and that there would be more than fifty years until she could revisit it. She held a child in her arms and one in her belly and she was alone, people wagging their tongues over how “he went and left her with two babies…” She was lean, tall, with a proud posture, her face wide open and her eyes made from light but from that day on she had them cast down toward the ground.

Time passed by through the wooden railings, the washed linen stirred furtively, then Time stood on the balcony over the flat thoughts of the people and looked at the camera lens that, at that specific moment, was focused on Time. The photographer took no notice of Time, nor did the guests at the coffee shop, nor the priest or the young boy or the woman with one baby in her arms and another in her belly. Time became one with the ordinary, simple folk of the village; Time became the place, the air, the light, the street and the rain and stopped within the photograph of Reno Watson for keeps.

Translated by Despina Pirketti

Birthday

I celebrate my birthday believing that every day on earth is paradise.
Yet paradise is also a battlefield where light
comes to grips with darkness for the victory of the one over the other…

During the night, I was rain / I knelt beside a song / I went into the sea with legs in the air / Your eyes within time / traces of deep green

spreading in the forest / over the bodies of hidden lovers / The other day I tried on my old red dress / It slipped over my body like an eel / And yet the wind took it / As the horse was galloping through my years

I unbuttoned the sky
Naked
to embrace me

Translated by David Connolly

THE CAUSE

It was the sand hills.
The house that stood alone.
The sea that slid on a shore exclusively its own
and the tamarisks that grew unrestricted.
It was the moon that waxed day by day
till it became red like a ball of ice-cream
that invited me to taste it
and the wind that blew sand on the faces
sand light and damp that glistened and stuck to the skin.

And you, who weren’t here
yet you filled the room
with a love unrestricted like the tamarisks.
You weren’t here.
Yet you were the cause.

Translated by David Connolly