THE BRIDGE (excerpt)
Truly how beautiful and strange life is, isn’t? As
I return to you with another thankfulness
and I ask you for a piece of your daily bread,
a hard part of your responsibility,
a straw mattress, just outside in the hallway
like the one we shared in our detention camp,
when each sharing was another augmentation,
when “we divided our cigarette in two
and our hearts in the four points of the horizon”,
there I go again repeating my old verses. You see?
The need for a piece of bread, for a kiss, for air,
for friendship doesn’t humiliate us, a window towards
the east that we might breathe when night falls,
justifiably letting our arm rest for a while,
serene and idle on the shoulder of silence,
to be rocked by the rhythmic breath of silence —
this hand that will labour and will be rewarded, that
will have lost the crooked shape of theft,
of supplication, of beggary, of charity and will be
extended, honest and positive and straight in the palm
of life with the modest dignity of knowledge that
it digs, writes, gives, and deserves to take, while
the light, lawful and useful, will turn into a sphere
in the eager contour of its palm, like a fresh,
diaphanous, warm egg of an eternal birth.
Mayanaam
vequinox
Manolis 