The days without sugar

Are many.
The brain
Tunneling its
Thoughts
along paths.
A solitary journey
among the glare
Of crowds
Crows fly up
Into the sun
From the wheat field.
Only in the drop
Of the heart
and of the
Eye
Are handles
to
Heady
Sweetness,
To love,
And to kingdoms
of
The western flower.

Life reveals itself
In the smallest
Of things
A rip,
A tear

A line
The murmuring of
Spring
The first step
of children
And the butterfly wing

Translation of George Seferis “Epiphany ”

There is something about translating a poem from a different language, that brings you inside the words, forces you to go around them, and clearly delineate them. As Scott Griffin has recently said, a translation causes you to “recreate the original work of poetry” into its’ twin born by the translator, which contains the combinations of letters that replicate the poem in strands, one by one, genetically, like DNA. This is my translation of what I believe is a very beautiful and very original poem.. “Epiphany” by George Seferis. At the end of the poem is a link to a very relevant, and interesting lecture on Seferis and his work.

Epiphany 1937

The blossoming expanse
And the mountains,
Drowned in the crescent moon.
The large stone
By red flowering cactus and white asphodel,
And that urn that
Refused to stand upright
At the end of the day.
And the cloistered bed
Near the cypress trees,
And your hair golden
As the celestial swan stars of the heavens,
And that one single star Aldebaran.
I held and kept my life,
I held,
And kept my life
Travelling
In amongst the yellow trees
Towards the one side of the rain,
On the silent shores
Loaded with the piles of leaves of autumn,
With no fire in their midst, at their peaks.
The darkness is falling.
I held and kept my life.
At your right hand is a line,
And a gash is at your knee.
Would they still be there
In the sands of the now past summer ?
Would they remain there
In the gusts of the northern winds, as I hear the foreign voices round the frozen lake ?

The faces I see do not ask, neither does the woman walking, hunched over, breastfeeding her child.
I climb the mountains,
Into the dark pines.
The snow filled valley,
So far across, the snow filled valley; nothing do they ask. Neither the times brought to a close …Neither the hands that stretch out to ask, to beg;

and the roads … I held and kept my life in a constant murmuring, in silence unending. I don’t know how to speak anymore, how to contemplate the murmurs that are so like the breathing of the cypress trees that night, like the humanlike voice of the night waters on the pebbled shore.
Like the memory of your voice saying…”happiness, bliss”.
I close my eyes seeking the secret and mystic meeting of the waters under ice, the laughing smile of the oceans, the hidden deep wellsprings, high flowing in my veins; those veins which seek to spirit away to the places where the water lilies end, to that place where that man wanders blind on the snows of silence. I held, I held, and kept my life, with him, yearning for the waters that so lightly brush and caress against your body, heavy drops on green leaves; on your face… in the empty garden. Drops on the still wellspring, find a dead Cygnet In between its pure white wings. The trees are alive, and your eyes, facing towards the sun. This road will not end. There can be no change in it. As much as you wish for, as you hope for, a remembrance of your childhood, for those who have left, for those that were lost in their sleep…that ever, ever, endless expanse of tombs; as much as you ask for the bodies, the forms that you once loved, to bend below the harsh boughs of the plane trees, at that place where a single ray of sunlight stood naked, and the dog bolted, and your heart fluttered; this journey cannot be changed. I held and kept my life….the snow and the water frozen, in hoof tracks of horses in earth.

On Seferis: https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=5s_312nScyo

The Elder

I had a certain
Older relative
who was a man
Of passions,
Somewhat charismatic,
Who had no time
For tears,
Except perhaps
In private.
No one really ever knew.
He frequently
Called his martial heart
a whore,
And was concerned
With what he called
the little
Man
And thought
That little man
was quite a bit
More
than consequential.
A man of action and
Of no fear
He had blazed trails alone,
Opening ways for others.
He believed real men
Had broad shoulders
And narrow waists
And was often
Prone to a savage
resolve.
He and I,
We had an unspoken
Bond, never quite revealed,
but only in the odd
sideways glance,
That never faltered much,
That once might have released a tear,
But did not,
Only a side
Crossing of his
Arms which
sometime
Later
I realized
was as close
To an embrace
As it would ever come.
I have made friends
Of such men
at times
Not realizing
That I was always
leaning back
To him.
He passed away
Unable to do very much
but barely breathe,
And I remember
I told him
He was loved.

There
Is only
Love that
Heals
That bundles
That overcomes
Only love
That time increases.

The Last Station

Few are the moonlit nights
That I care for.
The alphabet of the day that one pronounces, as the day’s efforts dictates,
And that one interprets Into other meanings and hopes, that one will now more clearly be able to read.
Now that I sit idle and
Unemployed
and consider
That but a few moons are left in memory,
Islands,
Colours bereaved
Of The Virgin.
Slow stanzas.
The night moonlight
once fell on cities of the North
Fell once
on traumatized roads,
rivers and traumatized people’s futures
Heavily
And yet last night
On this
Our last station
where we wait for
our return to dawn,
Like some old debt that
Has remained bundled
in a money hoarders
treasure chest.
And finally the moment
has come for payment
And the sound of coins
Are heard falling on the table.
In this Tyrrhenian village
Behind the sea of Salerno
Behind the harbours
Of return
on the edge of an autumnal gust
The moon overcame
The clouds,
lit,
enamelled,
houses on opposing shore.
Beloved silences of the moon,
A means of thought,
A way of speaking of things that one considers truly difficult.
And at those unbearable moments
When a leaf secretly escapes and brings tidings of home, of life companions, and you rush to open your heart lest the exile of living in foreign lands, heads you off and changes it.
We come from Africa, from Egypt, from Palestine,from Syria, our holding place Commagene, that was snuffed out like a small lamp.
Many times it turns about in our minds, the large cities that flourished for thousands of years, that then later became fields for shepherds,
Fields for sugar cane
and corn .
We come from sands of barren lands from Protean oceans
Souls marred
From public sin
Each one displayed
like a bird in a cage
The wet rain soaked autumn
here in this ditch
Infects the wound
In each one of us,
that which one would otherwise call nemesis
or fate
Or perhaps merely bad habit
Unfortunate, unscrupulous,
And final,
bearing fruit
on the blood of others.
Easily a man is ground up in wars.
Man is soft, a bundle of grass, lips, and fingers that desire;
A white breast, eyes with lids half closed in the brightness of day ,
and feet that, although so very tired, would run at the smallest whistling of profit.
Man is soft and thirsty like grass, unwashed like grass .
Roots are his nerves and they spread. When the harvest comes he prefers that the threshing begins, the scythes whistling, in the neighbouring fields. When the harvest comes, others scream to exorcize the demons, others preoccupy themselves in their innocents, others break into rhetorics,
but the exorcisms, the innocents, the rhetorics, seeing as the living are so far away, of what use are they? Perhaps humanity is another thing, perhaps it is that which imparts life. Time of sowing, time of reaping. Always the same , the same things, you will say I tell you my friend. But the thought of the refugee, the thought of the prisoner, the thought of the man become possession, possessor, try and change it. You can’t. Perhaps he has wanted to remain a king of cannibals, spending strengths that no one would buy. To wander in the valleys to hear thundering under the bamboo trees. But at the spot where they beat and hack at him,
Or on broken platforms
Without water, broken windows, night and night again,
Or on the ship in flames that will sink, as statistics show, these are rooted in the brain and do not change; these are planted images in the brain, same as the trees that drop their seeds in the virgin forest which are nailed into the soil to grow once again, and drop their seed again. A virgin forest of the murdered leaves of our minds.
And I speak to you in fables and parables because this is the way that they sound sweeter, and what travesty can’t be spoken, because it’s alive, because it’s unspoken, and it proceeds, it drips in the day, it drips in sleep. Our pain. Should I speak of heroes, should I speak of heroes : Michael who left the hospital with open wounds. Perhaps he was speaking of heroes that night as he was dragging his leg through the darkness of the city , crying out our pain in a high pitch: through the darkness:
We are travelling in the darkness, we are proceeding, through the darkness. Heroes proceed in the darkness. Few are the moonlit nights that I care for.

-George Seferis

The time

finally

Comes

That billows of snow
and small
evergreens
Yeild
Change.
Sanitary
White corridors
Yeild
To blue
then green
Wheels turn.
Cycles end.
New ones
Begin.
Only the blossoms
Again.
New life of children
Black and white TV
To cell phones
Apps
for the mind’s
Appetite.
Building
and destroying
worlds.
Dollars and cents
renew
depleted till
They fill again
Or close.
The persistence of credit
Treads of commerce
And loans
All the while
Only blossoms
Constant.
Laying out
Renewed
urban sprawl
Like carpets
Harbingers
Of elegant or pitiless decay.
Trees
Mostly renewing
Themselves.
Silence is a
Language itself
something
like time or
A strumming guitar
By the water
Speaking beginnings.

Resting in the shade

of a tree

white roses in two vases

next to each other

on a peaceful green.

Fugue

There was no warning
That steps
Might be made
Into music,
No inkling that
A journey
Could become a song,
Only a vague
thought,
ancient remembrance,
that when words
Fall into pits
of time
and stay
lodged deeply,
there could be
a presence
of poetry
which you,
noble soul
With nimble fingers,
could weave
Into notes
and music
Of a song,
A syncopation
of single steps
played long :
Myth and stories
Are made for children
while the older
Know
what things
appear to be,
And what they may be,
May not indeed be.
We feel in our perception
A base heaviness
Of step.
And older men
Measured In chains
and leagues,
are often turned
to pigs that bleed,
To tell a story
In a dream of
anything but clear
cut black and white,
In an elusive song
Of love
brought about from
word.
And there are
certain thoughtful
women
who take a man’s
story,
And can simply
make it music,
Through secret
And softly
whispered
salutations
To the midnight
stars.