Kornaros's Classic Poem in Longhand by (an 12-year old resident of Crete) Manolis Emmanuel Aligizakis
Greek Canadian Literature Libros Libertad Manolis Aligizakis
Humbleness
This noise that displaces so many small and interesting
objects pressing the boy against the wall, the cart, the
old woman, the traffic cop —
the third man didn’t ask for anything but to be minimal.
He was alone, unintentionally ignored, growing with his
shadow when evening comes, not a hero or subservient,
sad, alone opposite the shut windows of the Travel Agency,
in a garden of wax and wire created by him. The flag
was spread on the moist grass.
LIFE IS A POEM
The elbows of the sky on two poplars
and on my insomnia,
the waiting is endless,
ah, the pulse,
the leaves are impatient.
My birth begins,
the shadow in the corner of the room
is stretching out his long fingers,
white horse gallops through the city,
mum’s gaze
fills my glass … with angels
ah, the pulse,
swinging trees,
the rocking.
In this body, shrouded in mystery,
it’s written I have a long way to go,
the inscription inside
is invisible,
no one can see it,
neither the place of the words, the game, the luck.
I hear the milky white creature coming,
I can smell honey,
the health of autumn,
the groundwater
for the thirst coming later,
and the forest-smell of the fire.
PLACe oF THe HeART
For Maria Kyrtzakis
Don Giovani aroused the desire.
To what level? To what level?
Until with each new love its loss
becomes the only knowledge.
Sweet, sweet, I pronounce
as others say worthy, worthy
though him, drunk of all the shapes
of women he has hugged
pins me in his collection.
I was the emptiness of his emptiness
a body for his body
sometimes he shouted crazy words
sometimes his soothing silence wrapped around me
and I surrendered to an imbued nostalgia
for the place where eros was born.
Because, if as they say,
our desires confirm
the magical place of their fulfilment
then the Desired one
is the only proof
that love was once
nourished in my viscera
like a hyena or a hierophant
one chance that was found
when man dared
to dream that he loses.
He presently loses his face
that he’ll enter like poison,
like a creek, like a faint breeze
like blood inside the other man
and he’ll vanish without
losing or winning anything.
Lamda
I longed to sit under the thick shade
of the ancestral grapevine and
to enjoy the serene evening
as the bats float in mid-air
at the soft song of the breeze
I longed to drink my sweet coffee
in the village café and
to turn my cup absentmindedly
to read the formations of coffee dregs
and to explain the path
I’ve followed
from the old house on the hilltop
to the four corners of the world and
I said,
new lands I’ve visited and
new images I’ve seen
virginal concepts I’ve created
and new emotions I’ve felt and
when the last years of life come
I’ll spread my legs under the table
and feel the whims of time
joining mine while I have a vague
smile upon my lips, witnessing
the exceptional seed I once was, and
I said,
let the innocent children come forward
let the wholesome men fall
in the trench and let them take
their last breath in the moist soil
so that the profits of the multinationals
continue into eternity and
let the simple-minded flourish on Earth
I, too, longed to visit exotic locales
that I dreamed of when I was a child
even if that was in my imagination’s garden
truly, what’s the difference between
imagining and touching
two faces of the same coin
one to live with the other to die alive
I, too, longed to drink water from the spring
like the summer days of my childhood when
I walked out to see the round buttocks
of the village girl holding a pitcher on her head
I longed to get her into my dream
and never let her come out and
I said,
a loner and a bookworm, I was meant
to be, let each of my days be worthy
of my diving deep into
the philosophical trenches of pneuma and
the logical paths of my spirit onto which
I have always focused my mind since
miracles take place in the openness
Mayanaam
vequinox
Manolis 