FOREVER haunted, forever exiled; only our song, somewhat
saddened,
spoke of our path or it sometimes helped us escape; we took
refuge in myths, same as with a silent woman
or we turned simple-minded, so simple they could lose us.
And truly, where is the kingdom
when each of us, alone, will listen to the creak of a star
late in the night?
On A foreign Line of Verse
For Elli, Christmas 1931
Fortunate the one who has made the voyage of Odysseus.
Fortunate he who starting out felt the rigging of a love
strong in his body, spreading on it like the throbbing
blood in his veins.
A love of indestructible rhythm, invincible like music
and infinite
as though it was born when we were born and when we die
if it dies too neither we know nor anybody else.
I ask god to help me say, at a moment of great happiness
what that love is
when I sit sometimes surrounded by exile I hear its distant buzz like
the soft echo of sea joining with the inexplicable hurricane.
And again and again Odysseus’ phantom appears before me
his eyes red from the wave’s salinity,
overwhelmed by his yearning to see once more the smoke climbing up
from his warm hearth and his old dog waiting by the door.
He stands in greatness, murmuring through his whitened beard
words in our language, as it was spoken three thousand years ago.
He extends his palm, calloused by the ropes and the rudder, his skin
weathered by the dry north wind the heat and snow.
You could say that he wants to expel the superhuman one-eyed
Cyclops from among us, the Sirens who make you forget once
you hear their song, Scylla and Harybdis
so many complex monsters that stop us from remembering that he
too was a man who fought in the world, with soul and body.
He is the great Odysseus, he who designed the wooden horse and
the Acheans captured Troy.
I imagine that he comes to advise me how I can build a wooden
horse to capture my own Troy.
Because he speaks humbly and calmly, without any effort
as though he knows me like my father
or like some old seamen, who leaning on their nets
when winter approached and the wind raged
teary eyed they narrated to me, in my childhood years,
the Erotokritos song when I shudder in my sleep hearing the unjust fate
of Aretousa descending the marble steps.
He tells me of the deep pain you feel when the sails of your ship
swell with memory and your soul becomes a rudder.
And you are alone, dark in the night and helpless like the chaff
on the threshing floor;
of the bitterness to see your comrades one by one foundered
and pulled by the elements and scattered
and of how strangely you regain your strength talking to the dead
when the living who remain are not enough.
He speaks of…I still see his hands that knew how to feel
whether the mermaid of the prow was ideally carved
gifting me with the waveless blue sea in the heart of winter.
Flock
The sun shines over the long
peninsula when the shepherd gets up
to lead his flock to the sunlit mountain
slope, his dog, a loyal worker runs after
all the half-asleep sheep, especially the
ones that stray away from the rest and
which he guides back to the flock and
to the watering well where the old shepherd,
using a bucket, pulls water and pours
into the watering wood canal
where he guides his sheep to take
their fair share while birds around sing
their morning arias and the old man
feels he too can sing one of the local
four liners thanking the ineffable for
granting him another healthy day; tears
flow down his cheeks when he thinks
that one day he too will be done in
the arms of joyous Thanatos, time will
surely come when the old shepherd
will be obsolete since sheep and other
animals are raised in stables these days
sheep fed with chemicals enough
to make sure they grow fast
to make sure they are slaughtered
to make sure tonnes of meat is
produced for the meat-eating
consumers who live in the big cities
and in every corner of the globe.
Hellenic Canadian Literature 