Tasos Livaditis – Poems, Volume II

Long Listed for the 2023 Griffin Poetry Awards

2023 Longlist Announcement

Dead were coming with their ravaged, bloodied army
overcoats covered by a thick layer of mud
with their huge, wide open glassy eyes as they were
when they were pierced by a bayonet
with their macabre mouth ripped from the last scream.
They were coming from the grey deserted battle grounds
with soiled faces, disfigured
at one moment they fell while others run trampling
over them as they marched and boots, wheels,
horses trampled them all day long
amid all the cannon blasts and the smoke
ey were coming with their bellies cut open,
teared to pieces, rotten
hardly breathing with inverted heads and mouths
like a huge, open wound hole
and they walked slowly in the immense red
dusk.
Some held their internals with their hands, others
held the uprooted crosses like rifles on
their shoulders
others kept pieces of a bomb still deep in their bones
and others with barbwires still in them as
they had embraced them when the machine gun
shot them.
And women, with their disheveled hair, were coming
from the bombed cities
still holding tightly their dead babies on their rotten
breasts.
Black skeletons turned into coal were held
in the crematoria with their burnt hands that resembled
tree roots crooked from agony

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In Turbulent Times

excerpt

his chair and tossed a few sods of turf into the grate from an old, dented, copper scuttle. As he settled into his chair again he glanced out the window at the low cloud and the soft drizzle of rain. The church was but a shadow on its rocky ridge.
Liam was restless. He laid the book aside and went to the scullery for a glass of water. Then he wandered into the empty schoolroom, though he knew not why. To look out at the main road perhaps. Or to see if the cloud showed signs of lifting off the mountains. No; it was lower on the shins of the mountains than his grandmother’s skirt. He was on the point of returning to the kitchen when he thought he saw Nora Carrick on the road. Imagination, most likely. He had not seen Nora since school broke up for the summer, though he thought about her often. No doubt she had come to his mind again, and some trick of the light and the shifting rain revealed her to him, an apparition of desire. For desire her he did. The memory of her young body fed his fantasies to the point of distraction. If only she would come again.
She did. She was there. And gone again across the road where he could not see her.
Yes, she was really there. He had not imagined it. She was on the road, crossing and recrossing it, as if to approach the schoolhouse and then withdraw, undecided, frightened perhaps. But why? Did she want him again? Was she afraid to approach him in case he would spurn her advances?
He rushed to the schoolhouse door, threw it open, and stood on the driveway in the soft rain. But Nora did not reappear. Perhaps her apparition had been in his imagination after all, his loneliness teasing him. He walked slowly towards the main road, his shirt becoming damp in the drizzle.
‘Nora?’ he called out.
She was there again but hurried away as quickly as she had reappeared. His shouting out her name had startled her. She stopped and turned and watched him run towards her. The rain formed tiny dewdrops on his hair.
‘Liam,’ she said quietly. ‘I wasn’t sure if you’d be home.’ How transparently dishonest was her explanation, prepared in a hurry on the spur of the moment.
She tried to smile but made a wry face instead and looked sheepish, timid, guilty, like a child caught in the pantry stealing scones.
‘Come down to the house, Nora, and have a cup of tea.’ The puzzled look did not leave Liam’s eyes. ‘I was wondering when I would see you again.’

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Wheat Ears

Tears
Tears run down the cheeks
of the statue during its hour
of meditative thought as if
a merciless thunder covered
the shining palms of the tourist
flawless end and nothing
will ever sprout in my palms but
thanatos as the sun shone hot
on the glyph’s smooth skin,
on the decapitated bust of Athena
under which I’ll bury the foreign
perversion: lavish tables, canned nature,
and preservatives when the arm
of the Goddess pointed over the sand
to the end of the horizon
where birds sang with lustful voices,
joyous and pleasant quivering, first
hymeneal song of my virginal spring

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