As published in Volume 11, NO 1, March 2014
Poem Selections 1975-2006
POEMS (1975)
THE OLD WOMAN
Stepped out on the balcony and became entwined
with the flower pots, the green.
You could barely distinguish her
dressed in black
tending to her garden;
a voice of colours was smiling
in the veins of her thoughts.
Then she vanished behind the curtains
carrying the whole world
into her room.
SIX VERSE POEMS
III
I am nothing
but the emperor
of lost serenity,
the emperor
of an endless night
that travels not.
NEARLY ENEMY PARTNERS (1977)
POETS
Poets do not speak
with chicken-shit words
they open their mouths
and discharge word blades.
Poets walk with the people
not with their loneliness;
they unfurl their verses
flags to the future
and stand vigilant
with thousands of songs upon their lips
on Tel el-Zataar and Pentadactylos.
TRANSCRIPTION (1978)
NEFELI
What rainstorm has cast you
inside me
and year after year you take root
deeper in my every fibre
in my every blood cell –
a damned song
your touch a raised scar
a whirling thought
adamantly transfixing me,
your obstinacy
a vertical rock
that drops into the sea
your eyes wide
to the quakes of electroshock
lie in wait merciless
and sad in the darkness;
I feign ignorance
a clueless saltimbanco
and your perceptiveness
startles me
I howl at the unsuspecting sense
of your absence,
under the arches of a timeless
freedom you move and
shift inside me a girl
under the poplars in the yard
of a crumbling home transmuting
darkness to light
pain to song
storing the years of your adolescence
under the soil
in an underground vessel
your blood coursing
through my veins.
MULATTO ANGEL (1980)
CYPRUS POEM I
You are inside me
a tender shoot
fractured glass
at risk of breaking
a white jasmine in the dark
a song of blue and green
on a disc without grooves
on the gramophone of terror;
you are inside me
a small meadow
torn open by callous compressors
stuffed with concrete and radars –
then technology’s metal vultures
mount your skin
you bow your head
like a wounded deer
under the light of the sun
and the hundred-leaf spring takes longer and longer
my island.
SORROW OF THE AFTERNOON (2006)
LORD BYRON IN CONSTANTINOPLE
Gazes at the walls of Theodosius
and at the nose of Sultan Mahmud
(thin and sharp with an
upward turn)
and at the Ottoman cemeteries with the tall cypress trees;
he whispers the words pimp
bread water
then descends the Avenue
Istiklal
among crowds
of idle girls
in colourful shops, on the tram
gazing at history’s suspended sadness.
25.7.2005
IMMORTALITY
The poet Dionysios Solomos
in his black overcoat
with a woeful face gazes
at the moonlight of immortality.
IN THE GRAY LIGHT
The shattered world
of Cyprus
and the final words
of Cesare Pavese
“I shall never write again”
In Salamina and in Engomi
the stained moon
in the frigid night;
we breathe in the dark
shivers of spring
WOMEN IN LEONARISSO
“They speak not, yet communicate because they all know what no one will say” – Yiorgos Markopoulos
In a strange land alone
without manuscripts of memory
daydreaming sipping coffee –
at times they feel that they are choking, on loneliness.
The flowers in the yard an x-ray
“What have I accomplished by staying?” the younger
is heard saying.
And her soliloquy about Kanakaria
“We went by chance, the mosaics were gone.”
Then she sits with crossed arms
sadness gazes within the eyes
in the smile in the black dress
of Mrs. Niovi;
the children insult her
in a foreign tongue.
Translated by Irena Joannides
Lefkios Zafiriou studied literature at the University of Athens and taught in secondary education and at the Teachers College. His published works include: Poems, 1975; Nearly Enemy Partners, 1977 [State Prize for Poetry]; Transcription, 1978; Mulatto Angel, 1980; Sorrow of the Afternoon, 2007 [State Prize for Poetry]; Poems 1964-2010, 2011; The Mobsters, 1983 [State Prize for Prose]; The Life and Work of Andreas Kalvos 1792-1869 [Prize of the Academy of Athens: Costas and Eleni Ourani Foundation].
