Para Gerana e seu avô, que a protege

Manolis Anagnostakis

The morning

In the morning
At 5
The dry
Metallic echo
After the loaded trucks
That shattered the doors of sleep.
And the final ‘adieu’ of the day before
And the final steps on the damp tiles
And your last letter
In the arithmetic notebook from your childhood
Like the grill on the small window
Which slides up the parade of the morning’s
Joyous sun with perpendicular black lines.

Kiki Dimoula

A minute's licence

The house a tiny neighbour to the sky.
Nearness’ tendency built so high
on a peak’s open wings like
a lectern that splendour might read the dawning
the meridian the setting gospel of the day.

I go out into the yard. Waiting for me sparkling
with reins saddle harness is the horizon’s wild freedom
that I might mount and galloping tame its verification.
Ah, only gaze and vision managed to ride
this immaterial untamed conquest.
The heavens’ overweening views tumble are dashed
for the unhindered is of the briefest duration.

See how it catches on a stretch of barbed wire
round the property. Low, tame and yet
if you look carefully consider it carefully it divides
my good-morning from the neighbour’s
all day long fanaticising borders quietly arming
the weeds against their brothers.

At night alone the unifying fragrance of night flowers
cuts through it in places and passes
in the demented glow of the fireflies
– glowbums we called them when alive.

Oh, inglorious heroics by volunteer dreams. What’s the point
in encroaching on two inches more of moondust
inheritance left by the summer to its passing.

Let them observe a minute’s licence
those few illiterate widow extensions
that the law doesn’t cover

though no one knows
what hope still holds in store for them.

Summer, Platanos-Aigialeia

Nikos Fokas 

The Lovers

Oh miserable patrons of the concert hall,

I watch you as you listen to a piano piece

Ostensibly playing it on the arms of your seat

With fingers twisted, aching and arthritic,

Aping, poor wretches, the distinguished soloist

On stage or, further back, the famous composer,

Ostensibly playing the tune, beating the rhythm

Conducting it for all the world with head or foot.

Truth to tell, what frustrated composers or soloists we all are;
And indeed what frustrated lovers
– In spite of all the loves we may have known – ;
Frustrated yes, but not resigned, playing as we do
Into our ripe old age on the arms of our seat
Or even on the wood of our last bed, the same old tune
Like an answer to a dream long unfulfilled
And on matter that fails to respond to our fingers.