Giorgos Moleskis [Cyprus]

 

The Gorilla of Berlin
 
A gorilla in the zoo of Berlin
roams in rage inside his walled
and iron-barred pit. He watches us
with a dark stare like a life sentenced prisoner.
He certainly has complete awareness of his situation
and hates his fate, just as he hates us,
the ones who have made him the spectacle.
 
If he could scream straight at us
all the things he thinks of us
we would not know where to hide our faces.
 
But he would much prefer to be free
outside of his pit
and like some mighty god, emancipated,
scatter us all to his right and left
and leap over our heads,
over the zoo’s fence, the streets,
the houses, the apartment buildings, the factories,
the trains and cars
 
and find himself in his virgin forest
one thousand years before all this, alone,
face to face with his own god.
 
(Translated by Marilena Zackheos)
 
 
Unfading Roses
 
Only the spirit gives birth to unfading roses
and only art creates perfection.
With all the pluses and minuses of history
and of the soul of man
the verses of Homer,
the statues of Michelangelo
and the grey of Theotokopoulos continually expand.
 
Only things useless in the material world
can stay the same and change
according to their position and according to time,
with the agony of the soul and the projection of the mind,
accepting only addition and multiplication.
 
Often, all else falls into the minus
and into division, becoming stages of transition
for the orchestration of the crime.
 
If there is hope that, at the end, something will last,
that is the soul and the otherwise useless things
that are her bread, her water, and her honey.
 
(Translated by Irena Ioannides)

Night Out In Lefkosia

Tonight I was ruthlessly bombed by the news.
These turned me into a ruin
at some Syrian city,
an orphan child crying
over his father's dead body
in a desert of Iraq,
an immigrant floating on the waves,
a refugee walking alone at a foreign land.
 
I go out on the street, walking in a city
divided by war,
having seen murder and rape,
cried for the dead and the missing,
one city where again,
in her deserted neighbourhoods reside
new refugees, more immigrants.
 
I walk alone, in the dark and in the cold,
a full moon from above
is looking at me indifferently
and from a speaker on the street corner
Verdi's voice reaches my ears
in a grand polyphonic crescendo:
tutto nel mondo è burla!…(*)
Soloists, musicians, dancers,
each one and all together:
tutto nel mondo è burla!…
 
Beautiful, enchanting the composer
placed this bitter pause
at the end of a march
that reached perfection.
I walk and Verdi follows me
bribing me:
tutto nel mondo è burla!…
 
(*)"This world is a joke".
 
(Translated by Tringos)
 
 
 Author’s Bionote:
 
*Giorgos Moleskis: He was born in 1946 in Cyprus. He studied at the Nicosia English College and the Moscow State University – Lomonosov. He has an M.A. degree in Russian Language and Literature and a Ph.D. degree in Literature. He worked at the Cultural Services Department of the Ministry of Education and Culture of Cyprus and the Cyprus Symphony Orchestra Foundation. He has published fifteen poetry collections, two books with collected poems, five books with poetry translations from English and Russian languages and three prose books.       Eleven of his books were translated and published in separate volumes in France, Italy, Serbia, Romania, Bulgaria, Spain, Albania.  His poetry collection “The incomplete poem” was translated and published in Turkish language and his short stories book ‘The passing spring’ in Albanian language. Poems of Giorgos Moleskis have been translated and published in literary magazines and anthologies in Russia, Germany, France, Italy, Bulgaria, Rumania Turkey, Ukraine, Finland, Armenia, Estonia, Spain, Chile and other countries. He was awarded with a Cyprus State Honorary Diploma and a Cyprus State Prize for Poetry, the Pushkin Metal from the Union of Russian Writes the Giorgos Philippou Pierides Prize of the Union of Cyprus Writers and the Tefkros Anthias and Thothosis Pieridis Prize of AKEL. He is, also, an Honorary Member of the State Academy of Slavic Culture of the Russian Federation, the Union of Cyprus Writers and the Greece – Cyprus Cultural Association.