POEM BY NAPOLEO LAPATHIOTIS
POET
The drama of your life and art,
so insignificant and yet so deeply thought,
spending your mind’s magnificence
in futile, laughable diversions,
playing with words all day and night,
testing how to put them next to one another,
how to mix them and add music to them,
how to enclose your dreams in verse.
Such pain and struggle, such an agony
to mould and turn your sorrow into harmony
and knead it using all your craftiness
just to return it to the people,
truly I don’t know of any other drama
more important than your pain
the pain that longs be imprisoned in a cage
its space the alphabet of man.
And after you have played with rhymes
and words like little children in their games
and after you’ve diminished all your hope
and lost yourself among your memories
as soon as the regrets appear
when the moment comes to bow or not
you lift your cross along with all your treasure
and to Golgotha you stumble to be crucified!
Hellenic Canadian Literature 