Three Poems by Manolis Anagnostakis

Poetics

You're betraying Poetry again, you'll tell me,
Man's most sacred expression
You're using it
again as a means, a pack mule

For your sinister objectives
In full knowledge of the damage you're doing
To the young through your example.

Tell me what you have not betrayed
You and your kind, for years and years,
Bartering your possessions one by one
In international markets and common bazaars
So you're left without eyes to see, without ears
To hear, with lips sealed and you say nothing.
For which of man's sacred rights are you arraigning us?
 

I know: preaching and rhetoric again, you'll say.

Well, yes! Preaching and rhetoric.
 

Words have to be hammered like nails.
If they're not to be lost in the wind

 Old Streets

Old streets I loved and hated endlessly
me walking under the shadows of the houses
unavoidable nights of homecoming, and the city is dead

I find my insignificant presence in every corner
make me meet you once lost range of desire I am too
Forgotten and untamed I walk
holding a flickering a spark in my wet palms

And there I was walking through the night without knowing anyone
and not even one, not even one knew me, knew me….

The Morning 

 

In the morning
At 5
The dry
Metallic echo
After the loaded trucks
That shattered the doors of sleep.
And the final ‘adieu’ of the day before
And the final steps on the damp tiles
And your last letter
In the arithmetic notebook from your childhood
Like the grill on the small window
Which slides up the parade of the morning’s
Joyous sun with perpendicular black lines