I
SPEAK - MILO
I speak of barefooted mothers
That loiter among the ruins
Of cities consumed by fire
Of corpses piled in the streets
And pimp-poets
Who are frightened at night
On their very threshold.
I speak of endless nights
When the light diminishes
As day comes in
Of overloaded lorries
And of steps
On the wet pavement
I speak of prison yards
Of the tears of those sentenced to death
But above all I speak
Of the fishermen
Who have abandoned their nets
To follow on his footsteps
And when He proved a coward
They did not rest
And when He betrayed them
They never renounced
And when He was glorified
They turned their eyes to the other side
They spat at their faces
They crucified them
But they always serene
Took to a road with no end
Without their vision
Being obscured or bent
Upright and solitary
In the terrible solitude of the crowd.
CHARIS 1944
We were all together
Unfolding tirelessly our hours
We were singing in a low voice
Of the days that were to come
Charged with multicoloured visions
Charis was singing
We kept quiet
His voice sparked small fires
Thousands of small fires that set our
youth in flames
Night and day he played hide and seek
With Death
In every corner every back street
He longed
Forgetting his own body
To offer a Spring to the others
We were all together
But you could say
That he was all of us.
Words
that we heard every day
No one had seen him
It was in the dusk
He must have had his fists tight as usual
In his eyes was unfadingly engraved
The joy of our new life
But all that was simple
And time is short ...
One doesn't manage to ...
We are not all together any longer
Two or three have emigrated
Another has retired far away
With an equivocal attitude
And Charis was killed
The ones have left and others came
The streets are full
An uncontrollable crowd pours out
Banners are being waved again
The wind whips the banners
Songs float in the abysm
If among the voices
That pierce inexorably the walls by night
You distinguish one, it's his
It sparks small fires
Thousands of small fires
That set our untamed youth in flames
It is his voice
That buzzes round the crowd like a sun
That embraces the universe like a sun
That strikes at despair like a sun
That reveals to us like a sun
Radiant cities
Stretching before us bathed
In truth and fair light.
Origins of Arcadia VIII | Comment
by Gail Holst | Biography of Anagnostakis
| "O
Epizon" (Arcadia VII) | Arcadia
I | Arcadia II | Arcadia
III | Arcadia IV | Arcadia
V: March of the Spirit | Arcadia
VI | Arcadia VII | Arcadia
X | Home