LONG barbarous roads: they slaughtered the harmless animals
in the backyard, behind the columns, lenders gazed at the city
spitefully, merchants and travelling seers always see bad omens
and black women and children in the agora
at the hour when from inside the cup that the enraptured raised
to drink the key to the kingdom suddenly fell.
This much I Gazed
This much I have gazed on beauty,
my vision is filled with it.
Contours of the body. Red lips. Sensual limbs.
Hair as if taken from Greek statues,
always beautiful, even when undone,
and falling, a bit, on the white brow.
Faces of love, as my poetry
wished them…in the nights of my early manhood,
in my nights, secretly, met…
ORESTES
Perhaps for this reason my sister never forgave her —
for her eternal beauty — this old woman-little girl, wise
in her antithesis, given in her denial of beauty and joy —
ascetic, repulsive in her wisdom, alone, unrelated,
even her cloths are spitefully old, flowing over her,
out of fashion and her belt is but a loose string, worn out,
like a vein without blood around her waist (which she
constantly tightens) like the string of a fallen curtain
that doesn’t open or close anymore, slanting and
showing an image of an eternal acrid austerity with
sharp rocks and huge trees, leafless, branching over
some stereotypical, pompous clouds; and there
at the far end, the presence of a lost sheep, a white,
lively stigma, a grain of tenderness — invisible —
and my own sister a vertical rock enclosed in its
toughness — unbearable. Listen to her, almost
fastidious; she gets excited as she observes mother
placing a flower on her hair or her breasts, when
she crosses the hallway with those musical steps,
when she leans her head a bit with certain
sorrowful leisure, echoing a significant sound
from her long earrings to her shoulder, which only
she hears — her sweet privilege. And my sister
gets angry.
Version of Doomsday
The eye which got tired looking at
the perennially same dream
the eye that connived colorful imitations,
what an eyesore on morals. Which cry
enriching the movement inside the image
with joyous sounds until it convinced us
that souls wear animal skin to be recognized
and to appease inexistence with their body.
No one knows accurately what may transpire
since the photographer might accidentally
raise the level of milk for a few seconds,
and choke the world noiselessly, like
a puppy,
into the absolute darkness of white.
Hellenic Canadian Literature 