Yorgos Markopoulos [Greece]

 The Band 

A band was proceeding along a provincial coast road.
It was playing military marches. A fourteen year-old lad,
wearing a wide hat and music's old clothes
and playing a trombone, didn't see the bend in the road.
 
And so the band turned, while the lad walked straight on alone.
With his large hat and trombone.
 
(Translated by David Connolly)
 
 
In The Asylum Yard
 
One Sunday we were sitting in the glare of the asylum yard
till suddenly someone got up and said: 'tell us about her".
 
And so I began:
"Her soul a country cottage in winter
where each morning you saw the oranges in the garden
and you thought to yourself someone will come
some rightful heirs will cut down those trees.
I opened it then and went in.
In the hills I encountered gun emplacements
abandoned from some other occupation,
graveyards in the infants' section
with Easter candles
and tiny wreaths blossoms of white and pink.
And time passed
with me always all alone sharing her deep loneliness
like beasts do the water at their watering hole
till years later I was present at her wedding.
Everyone laughed at that sorrowful fete
and that father of hers kept washing his hands
before giving away her slaughtered will
to time great tamer of wishes.
I remained looking at her from aside.
She 'd been slaughtered, with her breast bare
and her hair loose.
A sleeping beauty for her grave, I shouted,
in the next world I want to be a river and she a spring
dark Alpheus and distant Arethusa
that our waters might mingle in the depths of the sea.
I no longer retain details.
Just in spring
I dimly recall her in my lucid periods".
 
And they all grew sorrowful at my story and no one spoke.
Only at dusk when the sun was struggling with night
someone called to me: "the woman you told us about is passing on the horizon".
 
I turned and gazed far off.
Passing by was a stream of people
young and old from a world gone by; with overcoats. Ragged.
With a ripped belt round the waist. Ranked.
 
And last of all was you. Alone.
Testing the way with a stick, like the blind.
 
(Translated by David Connolly)
 
 
Alcestis
 
Alcestis deeply hidden destiny and Alcestis my fate
so much that suddenly one morning
believing I could bear the happiness no more
regard your face in my hands
the boat that you find in the tiny harbour
with no fisherman in it for ten days
and regard your body a closed-down quarry
where I stood away waiting to hear the explosion
alone, Alcestis, I cried out.
 
Into my depths you come, advance,
and like five quails my words
fly up amid the rubble terrified.
 
You grasp my hands
and these await you, like a nanny two children
that she takes out after illness, they await you.
 
Into my depths you come, advance,
or into my dream once where I lost you and suddenly
my sleep became a scene of travelling players
in which the wind blew down the scenery
and all that remained was the storm lamp, the pitcher of water
and the arm suspended, with the strings,
that moved the puppets, Alcestis, that moved them.
 
My mind a lull at sea, Alcestis,
stirred by doubt about your love,
an arm out of the water
last signal from a person drowning
and my soul a glade when thunderbolts strike
to gaze on you with eyes that are startled
or to shine on you through a rent in the sky,
0 Alcestis, to shine on you.
 
Alcestis, resonator of untouched time
stifled cries, birds that flew low in pleasure
and hand whereby you touched me and on my shoulder
a mad medlar blossomed in the marble's cleft.
 
You are the head from an archaic female statue,
found in the field of a poor farmer
who hides it,
to gaze at it in the evening alone.
 
You are the ship preparing to sail
after first sowing evil,
the mine taken for a clock by some poor wretch
that removes three of his five fingers
that you might sit and take care of the rest
like two orphaned brothers one of which we've christened
though we also take gifts to the other,
you're valuables that the thief can't sell
since in the market they all know you' re mine,
you're the city's glare - at night - the golden ecstasy
at which, lost and startled, the wild beast stares,
trying to explain it from the hills,
the alarm of the breeze that beset my body
a garden fenced all round
and the spittle a snake's path
the suspicion on your nipples of another man
when secretly, 0 Alcestis, my tongue questioned them
when secretly it questioned them.
 
0 Alcestis!
 
House whose lock in my absence they once changed,
hillock of a mountain headquarters
that at midday I might climb to view the captive lands to view them
and, lastly, you're the umbrella I don't have
when alone I cross,
when alone I cross the soul's hills.
 
(Translated by David Connolly)
 
 
Author’s Bionote:
 
*Yorgos Markopoulos (1951) was born in Messini in the southern Peloponnese in Greece and lives in Athens. At university he read Economics. Besides poetry he writes literary reviews and studies, a number of which he has published in two volumes, “Excursion into the Other Language” (1991) and “Excursion into the Other Language Vol. 2” (1994). His first collection of poetry, “Seventh Symphony”, was published in 1968, when he was just seventeen years old. Since then he has brought out the following collections: “Eight plus One Easy Pieces and the Klephts of the Underworld” (1973); “Suburban Blues” (1976); “The Fireworkers” (1979); “Poems 1968-1976” (1980); “The Tale of the Stranger and the Forlorn Maiden” (1987); “Poems 1968-1987” (1992); “Don't Cover Up the River” (1998), “Shadow Striker” (2010) and “Poems 1968-2010” (2014). In 1996 he was awarded the Cavafy Prize in Alexandria, Egypt, He was awarded the Greek State Poetry Prize in 1999 and in 2011. In 2011 he was honored with the Prize of the Academy of Athens by the Costas and Eleni Ourani Foundation.