Neo-Hellene Poets, an Anthology of Modern Greek Poetry, 1750-2018

Poem by Kiki Dimoula

PURPOSE

I’m leaving

I won’t tell you where I’m headed

to pretend

I keep a secret from you.

I’ll furtively look into the sea-floor

to befriend the sea

entrusting it with my tempest

I’ll stir the stars with my height

I’ll set aside the unity of the sky

with my prayers

that in all these I’ll perhaps

discover your hidden purpose

that you perhaps have come to display the colors

and to annul the winters

or to switch off

the dial of my mind

dissolving your departure.

If I meet your purpose and find it sunlit,

endless, and in crimson color I’ll run to it

to rediscover it in your eyes

if by chance is hidden in the storm

I’ll pretend I didn’t understand it

if by chance in vain I search

patiently I shall press your chest

until you alone will betray it.

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Yannis Ritsos – Poems, Selected Books, Volume II, Second Edition

EROTIC TALE

She waited for him for two years, anxiously, as they say

and, one day, he arrived, early in the spring, as if nothing

             had happened.

That behaviour killed her. He didn’t understand that

she was dead before him, with the sunlit, square,

            open window as a background.

The looked at her with an erotic self confidence

with that cheap, almost professional, ugly freedom.

           His glance,

warm and cold at the same time, was piercing an old

           numb wound in her bones.

And it was a beautiful and strange image, as if someone

had died without saying a word, in the armchair of the dentist

who kept on filling his tooth, while the June sun

shone on the brown leather armchair.

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