Chloe Koutsoumpeli [Greece]

 

The Secret Life Of Poems
 
Ι
 
All poems are orphans.
They live in an asylum.
Some days as kids, other days as elders.
During nights they gather in the hall
And reads one another.
 
IΙ
 
All poems are guilty
Will never apologize.
Some are condemned to oblivion.
But memory is the most merciless judge.
 
ΙΙΙ
 
All poems hide a secret.
A trap door in every verse,
a hidden crypt
a loose brick, or a rotten plank
for the reader to slide and fall
 
ΙV
 
Most poems are afraid to die
that’s why they keep falling in love
but death never comes in an instant
actually their beginning is preparing it.
 
V
 
When a poem falls in love
it often becomes persistent.
It repeats its lyrics,
the same motion, the same caress
as a tide or a girl-acrobat on the snow.
 
VI
 
Poems are stars.
They keep sending their light
long after they die.
 
VII
 
If while you roam about happen to see
a poem that is an acquaintance of yours
please do not greet it.
Protest anonymity, pretend you do not know it.
No poem is fond of intimacy.
They offer their body to everyone
but they never kiss.
 
VΙΙΙ
 
Each poem is different from the other.
No poem is ever the same.
However, they all come from the same ancient origin.
 
IX
 
All poems are alcoholics,
they linger dangerously,
they sink in the bottle
they circulate in the blood
and then are thrown in the infinity.
 
Χ
 
Every poem is a man.
You lie with him in the dark.
In the morning all that is left
is the smell of a foreign flesh on the paper.

 

 

The Only Land

 

Ι wanted to write you a letter, but I didn’t know the hieroglyphics.

I wanted to touch you, but sometimes you were a century late, sometimes I came a millennium earlier.

When you left on the cave the imprint of your palm, my hand abruptly shrank.
When you painted buffalos, I was afraid of the bulls.

When Thira sank, I participated in the Minoan ritual of Spring,

When Rome was on fire, I lived in Pompeii.
When Agavi devoured you, I was entertaining Dionysos.

When you fought in the front line, I was in a concentration camp,

When they bombed your country, I was a tourist in the Alpes,

When you entered a train in Zurich, I was flying to Amsterdam.

All through time, in vain we struggled. Never were we at the same place at once.

But do people actually ever meet?

Besides how else could Poetry justify its existence?
Since it is the only land where souls can really meet.

 

 

Author’s Bionote:

 

*Chloe Koutsoumpeli was born in Thessaloniki (Greece) in 1962. Her first collection of poems was published in 1984. Ever since, she has published another ten collections of poems, three novels and three theatrical plays. Many of her poems were translated in English, German, French, Italian, Spanish, Slovenian, Turkish and Bulgarian and were included in Greek, American, Canadian, Spanish and German anthologies. Her collection of poems with the title THOSE WHO SIT IN THE SAME TABLE IN ANOTHER LAND, by Gabrielidis 2016 won in Greece the National Award of Poetry in 2017. Her theatrical play with the title ORFEUS IN THE BAR was played in Agora Theater in Patra in 2014, A collection of poems which have antiquity as their theme with the title ANTIGONE ALWAYS FORGETS SOMETHING WHEN SHE LEAVES, was published in 2020 by editions EL ARBOL DE LA LUZ in Sevilla, translated by Jose Antonio Moreno Jurado.