STAMATIS POLENAKIS

I KNOW NOT WHAT TOMORROW WILL BRING

I know not what tomorrow will bring.
I, the poet Fernando Pessoa,
dreamt that I am all the persons
who ever existed, I am the eyes of my mother
covered with tears, I am the thousands
who perished in the Lisbon earthquake
and a sick dog roaming about amongst the rubble.
I am Ricardo Reis, Bernardo Soares
and so many others whom I have forgotten.
I am someone who holds his lamp
in a deserted house.
Someone else, not I, is in anguish all alone
on a hospital bed – I know not
what tomorrow will bring – Today I am
simply a man about to die.

FROM THE LOST DIARY
OF VSEVOLOD MEYERHOLD

If the only truth of my life
was the lie of theater, then I am really  
guilty. But I’m not crazy, comrades.
I am very familiar with the guards’ steps
in the prison courtyard
and this searchlight on my face
and the thud of the bodies
that fall in the night, and I know the sharp sound
of the axes in the woods opposite.
I understand quite well what all this means.
It is all as old as the universe.
Now condemn me, since I see
nothing else before me but black walls.
For some time now I have been past
distinguishing reality from dreams,
but I am not crazy, comrades.
The lovely woman in white who throws herself
onto the railroad tracks every night
is, I think, Anna Karenina.

           POSTSCRIPT

I did my duty as best I could:
I held onto my life
with my teeth, with my bare hands, up to the end
I held onto it with the perseverance of someone
who continues to drive a rusty
nail into the hard wall.
I, a drunkard, sick, blind
still persist in driving
a rusty nail into the hard wall.
I saw in the blurred mirror of God
the last fireworks
of a world that is burning out: I saw
the past present and future
like a flash of snow.
I, who did my duty as best I could,
tentatively open the door
that leads to darkness.
I go from birth to birth.
I am already driving into the hard wall
the rusty nail of my future death.

THE CONDEMNED MURDERER
KONRAD LUDKVIST TECTOR
WAITS FOR HIS EXECUTION

Pray for me, the poor lamb of God Konrad Ludkvist
Tector who lost his way in the middle of the pitch-dark night.
Pray for me: while you are reading these words
I am already far away, I close my eyes and the images
pass by slowly like leaves falling from sick trees.
I believe in another world, where we
will all be seated at God’s large table.

Pray for me: these words
will be dispersed along with me by the wind.
Today, 18 May 1876, I dreamt I passed through
a sea of ice. Remember all of us, Lord,
in the kingdom of heaven: tomorrow
we will be shrouded in white smoke.

MAYAKOVSKY TURNS NINETY

The summer was brief
and the last vacationers
have already departed.
We slept for years in the cabins,
wrapped in old dead sailors’ blankets.
Tomorrow we set off for the unknown,
tomorrow we will be gently awakened
by the orchestra playing for the last time,
as if on a huge
illuminated ship that is sinking.
Farewell youth, farewell happiness, farewell life.
A white darkness
descends over Sakhjalin, over the leper colony,
over the frozen archipelago.
In the snow-clad parks
the sick poets cover their faces
with copies of ‘Pravda’.   

    LANDSCAPE WITH SNOW

The philosopher in front of his wooden shack
in the Black Forest was quite cordial
and these were the last words he uttered
while bidding his tired caller farewell:
Don’t leave just yet, let’s keep on talking
about Heraclitus and Hölderin all night long,
about life and death,
about everlasting tears
or about the snow and the beauty of the mountains.
But don’t ever ask me how they
tore out the hair, how they stole rings
from the fingers of the dead,
or which river they threw their ashes in.
Don’t ever ask me why
all this took place. What happened, happened.
Everything has already been said
and not even one more word
will I add.

 PHOTOGRAPH

I know quite well that no one
has ever stepped twice into the same river
but beyond these mountains
is another river
that I crossed again and again
traveling with an ancient dugout canoe
I am in my dream and I go
in an ancient dugout
against the dark current of time
One day we shall see each other again
one day I shall find my mother again
the same as she was then: with a grey school apron
sadder than a dead star
the summer of '59 at Phaleron
the same as she was then: with a grey school apron
just before her lamp burned out forever.

  SHADOW  

Autumn ponds
blanketed in gray
age-old leaves
the seasons pass
I think
of Basho
and in his memory
throw
one last
stone
while
blind fish
swim
next to the drowned
and they know nothing
about seasons that pass
about other blind fish
that once
swam
here
in the autumn ponds
next to the drowned
blanketed in gray
age-old leaves
the world
must
continue
after us
tomorrow
I will be someone else
who will throw the same
stone

 THE GREAT ENIGMA

Goodbye forever to this brief
age of freedom.
Farewell unforgettable days and glorious nights
and leaves scattered by the wind.
We were young, we hoped for nothing
and we waited for the morrow with the blind obstinacy
of the shipwrecked person who casts stones in the water.  

"Odessa Steps", Mikri Arktos 2012
Translated  by Richard Pierce

MY FATHERS BROKEN WATCH

To what purpose, I wonder, this incomprehensible
persistence of the hands
in circling blindly around a clockface
shattered centuries ago and to what purpose
the obsessive attentiveness
of the craftsman to detail
to what purpose the poet`s persistance
in plucking out his eyes into the dark
struggling to reconstruct the complex
mechanics of the poem
when entire populations are exchanged in the precise manner
that pawn is swapped for pawn on a vacant chessboard.

“The blue horses by Franz Mark”, Odos Panos, 2007

Translated by Konstantine Matsoukas