The Poem-Portrait
Gone are the days
when the bandits on Parnassus
were more than the snowfall
and drummers raised high-sounding walls
in the unfortified land.
Now in the palace square
they are laying the carpet weaved
with the fibre of class.
They leave the bandits’ severed heads
on a log-pillow
for the blood that turned out to be medicinal.
People gathered
to wash off evil in the stream of tears.
One of King Otto’s guards
in black and a red cloak like an executioner
held by the beard the head of Davelis
showing the crowd how obedient it had become.
Young at the time, the painter Gyzis
chased near the royal garden
a butterfly’s elusive dust
that made its wings iridescent.
He took the last colours
from the sunset’s palette
to paint the dark apparition.
The beautiful head of the chief of bandits opened its eyes
and stared beyond the bounds of his life.
The Minotaur
Who is he
that the night’s stagnant silence
bellyached
in the merciless daylight
with two palms for a face?
Behind every wall
you hear his breath
louder than a flock.
The inconceivable hidden
between human hair
and animal fur.
In the centre Minotaur
a creature haunted by a beast
with a knife cut
on his neck, like the way you open an envelope.
When evil is bad
it’s good to know what’s worst
the labyrinth with its innumerable ways.
The riddle is kept
in the teeth of the dead.
You designed a circle
to study like a spider
straight on its web
hanging with its mouth in the void.
A labyrinth is a centre
without periphery.
The Twilight Seen from Mount Vesuvius
When you enter the villa of Pompeii
where in every corner its tangible shadows
shine with promises
with the mysteries transformed
into painterly dreams
you interrupt a secret ceremony overnight
and in thorough sin.
The woman-satyr nurtures the deer
firmly, stimulatingly,
holding the sacred plenty of her breast.
With the look a secret opening
to the world’s immemorial age.
Phyllis comes out of the veil’s unfolding
that opens like a calyx
she dissolves in the air the outline of her body
made only of her glowing scent.
The planets’ dance begins
for the honeymoon love
in the intermittent glow
that torches wave like flags.
Young Faun’s face is shaded by the horn
life and death change masks.
Whatever you see let it escape your eyes
the twilight in its last syllable
the rolling of outcast life
with its embraced ashes.
In a villa without windows
wrapped in the aspects
of a forbidden work
who begs destiny
to save him from what is coming?
The theatre company is only a spectacle for the gods
and the painted dreams
don’t wait for the end of their night.
Elegy for a Fatal Pairing
to Andonis Fostieris
Twined souls
differently disguised.
The half-man of the Black Forest and the nymphet
a ewe whose hair is ruffled
on the approach of a stinking goat.
In the stormy crypt of his garment
he grasps with greedy hands his tail
for the unholy union
that corrupts the Cherubs.
The branded love hurries
in the thickening mist and night.
A blonde girl with a damned breath
whiter than an angel.
His fingers are orchestrated
in her crotch
touching the source of youth
under her damp lace.
Deficient creature that never became a woman
a perpetual child.
Her demon is transformed to one possessed.
Her flesh is not eatable
a precocious worm in a green apple.
A Mimic’s Masks
to Sophia Garpozi
The curtain falls
at the most fascinating moment of the play
when the two dancing partners
go across in turn
at the finale of the quadrille.
You hear in their laughter and their weeping
the play and the player
the puppets go up and down on a string
and fall without breath, without a single word
in the music’s sacred furore.
They wait for their puppeteer
to take the thread of their cut life
and just as their little bells
ring on the stage
all to be a mirror’s reflection
the marionettes on the stage
and the marionettes in the gallery.
Pierrot, Harlequin and Columbine
you who live the comedy of great love
the footlights however high they rise
above passions is the moon
and a star so near and yet so far
sets course
like a glinting tear.
Life has render us clowns
and rung by rung
we go up
the ship’s rope ladder
between the abyss of the sea and the sky.
Let it all be the art
that has no need of ground
and is to be found suspended in the air.
Inheritance and Will
The coachman decorates the hearse
he puts blinkers on the horses —
the wind’s continuous chafing
has smoothed their skin –
and he bridles their gallop
lest they should touch the vertigo of the abyss.
Widow and maiden of sin
hidden behind the veil
that waves in all winds
with his death she inherits her rejuvenation.
An endless process doesn’t see
in her dark eyes
the sunbeam that succeeds the downpour.
People empty of existence
for the immemorial chasm of time
with their fast-travelling dead man.
Consumed of flesh
he wills the dust.
Apelles Dying
to Neocles Kyriakou
Apelles painted Fryni
in the waves of Eleusis
baptized with the ethereal sperm of the gods
at their wedding celebration.
For her mountaintops
he was an unskilled climber
and in the dizziness of her ravine
orgiastic was the spring’s eruption.
He laid numerous layers of colour
to make with pleats
the sea marble-hued.
When he came to inaccessible waters
Fryni became
a blur of happiness
a distant echo
a spectre painted with the mist
in the evening twilight.
The apparition of his soul.
A Grassy Field in Northern Cyprus
to Lefteris Konstantinidis
Don’t let tears cause tears
here where you walk in the grassy field
and you see ploughed graves
the trampled crop of youth
a pile of copper-riddled bodies
others that needed a whole night
to die with lead in their guts
and the talisman beaten on their neck.
Let them stay in the lavandula stoechas
with immutable wounds like inscriptions on columns.
To you I resort, O bones, picked up
under gallows
when the rope punished fevered dreams.
With a crown of thorns, a chlamys and a reed
they ripped your vision
to its last glow.
In this grassy field
you see all the trampled crop of youth
that they won’t let it sleep
to be forgotten and to forget
until the end of the world.
With Child
To those who lost children and land
in Cyprus in 1974
The bayonet bent when it pierced her
and found the twins dwelling in her existence
before their dawn became rose-hued.
They were hugged spectres in her viscera
breathing their last.
On her slab was written:
“Grow in me, sperm of hope.
Replete with my children
I waited for their life to be determined
and they died of my death.”
They have no name nor the weeping of a newborn
to stammer the ignored right to life.
I leave, what remains, the aroma of my verse
of a dried-out flower the ancient pollen.
Going Across the Bridge
The suspension bridge expanded
its curves to infinity.
Those who passed it
walked without moving
their way.
They were lost like spooks
And not even half their cry was heard.
An eagle rose
in the utter desert as a roof of wind.
Heavy, laden with rain and snow
it perched upon an invisible rope
supported by the storm.
You went up the bridge, weighed down
with the earth’s orbits
and the canyon sawing it with its teeth.
Its stone mass was supported
by a woman’s skeleton
a shadow imprisoned in the foundations.
It waited for its deciphering
the miraculous point
where the vulture balanced.
Your hair was growing, eagle’s wings
in the wind’s direction
weighing your flight in outer space
like the walk of a wanderer
who loses his way in the wilderness.
The post Yorgos Moraris, from «The Poem- Portrait», ed. Kastaniotis, 2017 [Translated from the Greek by Yannis Goumas] appeared first on Ποιείν.