In love with Katerina Gogou ("The Loneliness")

[JackRiddler]

Katerina Gogou (Κατερίνα Γώγου)

The Loneliness (Η μοναξιά, 1981)

Loneliness...
Does not have the dismal color in her eyes
of the girlfriend floated in the sky.
She will not ramble, aimless, lazy
shaking her gambs at concert halls
and inside the freezing museums.
She is not your yellow pictures of “good” old times,
or the mothballs in grandmama’s chests,
purple ribbons and straw brim hats.
She does not spread her legs and give strangled squeals,
gazing like a cow, with sharp, rapid sighs
and matching lingerie.
The Loneliness.
She has the color of the Pakistanis, this loneliness.
And shall be accounted, dish by dish,
along with every broken fragment
at the bottom of the stairwell.
She stands upright, patiently, in line:
Pittsburgh – Santa Barbara – Red Hill
Toombah – Crossroads – Calamary Point
Below any color of sky
Her head sweats.
Ejaculates screaming breaking windows with chains,
Occupies the Means of Production,
Puts the Torch to Private Property.
She is the Visitors’ Hall on Sundays, at the prisons,
the same shuffle-in-the-yard, the convicts and revolutionaries.
She is sold and bought, minute by minute, breath by breath
at the slavemarkets of Earth – here, nearby,
is the square where they are traded.
Arise in the morning.
Awaken to see her.
She is a poutana in the ruined houses
a nightwatch for the soldiers
and the final, final, final
endless kilometres of the NATIONAL ROAD – CENTER CITY
lined with the trapped flesh from Bulgaria.
And when her blood congeals and she can bear no more
of her kind being sold out
she dances the Zem-be-ki-ko barefoot on the tables
holding in her stiff-blue hands
a well-sharpened hatchet
loneliness
The Loneliness, I say to us. Of ours, I tell.
It is a hatchet in our hands
Above your heads: watch it turn, watch it turn

Freely adaπted from the Greek by Nikos.Evangelos, 2013.
Astoria - Melbourne - Toronto - Chicago - Cape Town - Beirut
Bournazi - Ayia Varvara - Kokkinia - Touba - Stavroupoli - Kalamaria

Katerina Gogou, 1940-1993, was the anarchist poet of Exarchia and a bonafide Greek movie idol. Somehow I never heard of her until a couple of weeks ago, when I ran into, and was stung by, her poem “I Monaksia” (“The Loneliness”). As real Greek culture goes, I am but a bumptious American. I may love Bithikotsis but I couldn't tell Cavafy from Gaddafi, and more than once I almost forgot that Zorba is not originally a movie with Anthony Quinn.

Katerina. Now I feel as though I know her. She was a permanent revolutionary, always a proclaimed anarchist. Trained as an actor from childhood, she became a leading lady and later gave up on it to set her poems to eighties techno. Must we all make sensible decisions? She’s been described as a wild animal. By all accounts she grew apart from the domesticated animals and finally killed herself, age 52. Now you can see her perform on Youtube. I've been captivated by various scenes from a movie called Η Παραγγελἰα (“the order,” as in for a delivery). I wish I could find the whole movie. It seems to convey an urban story through images set to her poems, but maybe there is also dialogue.

Here is her recitation of “The Loneliness” from the film.


http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1TC06DzdDvo

I can see greatness, and watched this many times, but much was lost on me. (My Greek’s not good enough, but lately getting better.) Lack of understanding may have contributed to my obsession. There didn’t seem to be an English translation. Or secretly, I didn’t want to find one. In this one small thing, the first English rendering of her best-known words, she would be mine! I struggled – many hours, over days, to produce the above. I took liberties, to give it as I believe she meant it, to make it strike people over the head with intent to split, as it does in the Greek. One of her lines reads, literally:

at the slavemarkets of Earth – Kotzia is near here

Kotzia Square in Athens was, at the time of the poem, an outdoor market for day-laborers, where one would have seen the first small concentrations of Pakistanis in Greece. For clarity, I dropped the name and committed a heresy, adding a line:

at the slavemarkets of Earth – here, nearby,
is the square where they are traded.

And was it really too much of a stretch to turn Bournazi - former industrial zone, factories now refurbished into scene clubs, and most recently a site of depression like the rest of the country - into Pittsburgh?

Today, just as it was ready, while searching terms for a final check, I came across not one but two prior translations of “Loneliness” online. (Also, I discovered there is an out-of-print English volume of Katerina's poems, translated by Jack Hirchmann.)

You may compare the other two versions of “The Loneliness,” if you wish:

By Contrainfo http://en.contrainfo.espiv.net/2011/06/08/untitled/
By Taxikipali http://libcom.org/history/katerina-gogo ... -1940-1993

Modesty does not suit me. I worked hard for it and I think I win!



Also, I discovered her tomb in the Athens First Cemetary. Or rather, a picture of it online – behind that plaque, presumably, are her bones.



As this is the fate of almost all Greeks in Greece, even anarchists and unbelievers, I shall assume it; that her bones were dug up, seven to fifteen years after her death, dusted off, and put in a box, now behind that plaque.

Do not rest, Katerina - haunt them! Haunt the bastards! Chase this earth into another one!

Now here is the poem as Katerina wrote it:

Η μοναξιά
(Κατερίνα Γώγου)

Η μοναξιά…
δεν έχει το θλιμένο χρώμα στα μάτια
της συννεφένιας γκόμενας.
Δεν περιφέρεται νωχελικά κι αόριστα
κουνώντας τα γοφιά της στις αίθουσες συναυλιών
και στα παγωμένα μουσεία.
Δεν είναι κίτρινα κάδρα παλαιών «καλών» καιρών
και ναφθαλίνη στα μπαούλα της γιαγιάς
μενεξελιές κορδέλες και ψάθινα πλατύγυρα.
Δεν ανοίγει τα πόδια της με πνιχτά γελάκια
βοϊδίσο βλέμα κοφτούς αναστεναγμούς
κι ασορτί εσώρουχα.
Η μοναξιά.
Έχει το χρώμα των Πακιστανών η μοναξιά
και μετριέται πιάτο-πιάτο
μαζί με τα κομμάτια τους
στον πάτο του φωταγωγού.
Στέκεται υπομονετικά όρθια στην ουρά
Μπουρνάζι – Αγ. Βαρβάρα – Κοκκινιά
Τούμπα – Σταυρούπολη – Καλαμαριά
Κάτω από όλους τους καιρούς
με ιδρωμένο κεφάλι.
Εκσπερματώνει ουρλιάζοντας κατεβάζει μ’ αλυσίδες τα τζάμια
κάνει κατάληψη στα μέσα παραγωγής
βάζει μπουρλότο στην ιδιοχτησία
είναι επισκεπτήριο τις Κυριακές στις φυλακές
ίδιο βήμα στο προαύλιο ποινικοί κι επαναστάτες
πουλιέται κι αγοράζεται λεφτό λεφτό ανάσα ανάσα
στα σκλαβοπάζαρα της γης – εδώ κοντά είναι η Κοτζιά
ξυπνήστε πρωί.
Ξυπνήστε να τη δείτε.
Είναι πουτάνα στα παλιόσπιτα
το γερμανικό νούμερο στους φαντάρους
και τα τελευταία
ατελείωτα χιλιόμετρα ΕΘΝΙΚΗ ΟΔΟΣ-ΚΕΝΤΡΟΝ
στα γατζωμένα κρέατα από τη Βουλγαρία.
Κι όταν σφίγγει το αίμα της και δεν κρατάει άλλο
που ξεπουλάν τη φάρα της
χορεύει στα τραπέζια ξυπόλυτη ζεμπέκικο
κρατώντας στα μπλαβιασμένα χέρια της
ένα καλά ακονισμένο τσεκούρι.
Η μοναξιά
η μοναξιά μας λέω. Για τη δική μας λέω
είναι τσεκούρι στα χέρια μας
που πάνω από τα κεφάλια σας γυρίζει γυρίζει

And, finally, here is another poem, actually only a part of it, that Katerina's reminds me of:

II

What sphinx of cement and aluminium bashed open their skulls and ate up their brains and imagination?

Moloch! Solitude! Filth! Ugliness! Ashcans and unobtainable dollars! Children screaming under the stairways! Boys sobbing in armies! Old men weeping in the parks!

Moloch! Moloch! Nightmare of Moloch! Moloch the loveless! Mental Moloch! Moloch the heavy judger of men!

Moloch the incomprehensible prison! Moloch the crossbone soulless jailhouse and Congress of sorrows! Moloch whose buildings are judgement! Moloch the vast stone of war! Moloch the stunned governments!

Moloch whose mind is pure machinery! Moloch whose blood is running money! Moloch whose fingers are ten armies! Moloch whose breast is a cannibal dynamo! Moloch whose ear is a smoking tomb!

Moloch whose eyes are a thousand blind windows! Moloch whose skyscrapers stand in the long streets like endless Jehovas! Moloch whose factories dream and choke in the fog! Moloch whose smokestacks and antennae crown the cities!

Moloch whose love is endless oil and stone! Moloch whose soul is electricity and banks! Moloch whose poverty is the specter of genius! Moloch whose fate is a cloud of sexless hydrogen! Moloch whose name is the Mind!

Moloch in whom I sit lonely! Moloch in whom I dream angels! Crazy in Moloch! Cocksucker in Moloch! Lacklove and manless in Moloch!

Moloch who entered my soul early! Moloch in whom I am a consciousness without a body! Moloch who frightened me out of my natural ecstasy! Moloch whom I abandon! Wake up in Moloch! Light streaming out of the sky!

Moloch! Moloch! Robot apartments! invisable suburbs! skeleton treasuries! blind capitals! demonic industries! spectral nations! invincible madhouses! granite cocks! monstrous bombs!

They broke their backs lifting Moloch to Heaven! Pavements, trees, radios, tons! lifting the city to Heaven which exists and is everywhere about us!

Visions! omens! hallucinations! miracles! ecstacies! gone down the American river!

Dreams! adorations! illuminations! religions! the whole boatload of sensitive bullshit!

Breakthroughs! over the river! flips and crucifixions! gone down the flood! Highs! Epiphanies! Despairs! Ten years' animal screams and suicides! Minds! New loves! Mad generation! down on the rocks of Time!

Real holy laughter in the river! They saw it all! the wild eyes! the holy yells! They bade farewell! They jumped off the roof! to solitude! waving! carrying flowers! Down to the river! into the street!

Two weeks for 300 words! A prayer can be shorter, and be recited for many years. I prefer this manner of invocation.

[JackRiddler]

Here is the second half of the online Gogou biography at http://libcom.org/history/katerina-gogo ... -1940-1993. Copying here because relevant to "Loneliness," but it's best to follow the link read the whole thing from the start!

A few years later, in 1980, she will again perform in the big screen for “The Order” [Paragelia], again directed by Tassios. The film sought to depict the life of Nikos Koemtzis: on February 1973 after being released from prison, Koemtzis went to the music night club Neraida with friends, where his brother ordered from the orchestra to play a zeibekiko called “Vergoules” by the rebetis Marcos Vamvakaris. When other men stood up to dance as well [zeibekiko is a solo male dance from Asia Minor], the singer announced they should sit down as the song was “an order”, a fight ensued and Koemtzis stabbed to death three policemen thinking they were killing his brother. Koemtzis case became a celebrated issue in mid and late 1970s greece, representing a figure-out-of-time, a man obsessed with his honour in a society that was moving to an altogether different ethical code. The film featured a series of recitations of poem from “Three Clicks Left” by Gogou under the vanguard musical score of Kyriakos Sfetsas, the future director of the “Third Programme”, greece’s prestigious classical music state radio. The recital and musical score won the best music award in the Salonica Film Festival and was soon published in vinyl to become one of the musical fetishes of radical culture in the 1980s. It remains today one of the boldest attempts of combining poetry with music in greece. The best known poem recited during the film has direct political implications for the state of things in republican greece (http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=v-UX7LwMTtw):

“Loneliness
does not have the saddened colour
of the cloudy bimbo in her eyes.
She does not stroll abstractly and self-content
Shaking her hips in concert halls
And in frozen museums.
She is not the yellow cadres of “good” old times
And naphthalene in granny’s chests
Rosy ribbons and straw hats.
She does not open her legs with fake small laughers
A cow’s gaze rhythmic sighs
And assorted underwear.
Loneliness
Has the colour of Pakistanis, this loneliness
And she is counted inch by inch
Along with their pieces
In the bottom of the light-shaft.
She stands patiently queuing
Bournazi – Santa Barbara – Kokkinia
Touba –Stavroupoli – Kalamaria 9
Under all weathers
With a sweaty head.
She ejaculates screaming and smashes the front windows with chains
She occupies the means of production
She blows up private property
She is a Sunday visit in prison
Same step in the yard revolutionaries and penal prisoners
She is sold and bought minute by minute, breath by breath
In the slave markets of the earth – Kotzia 10 is near here
Wake up early.
Wake up to see it.
She is a whore in the rotten-houses
The german drill for conscripts
And the last
Endless miles of the national highway towards the centre
In the suspended meats from Bulgaria.
And when her blood clots and she can take no more
Of her kind being sold so cheaply
She dances barefoot on the tables a zeibekiko
Holding in her bruised blue hands
A well sharpened axe.
Loneliness,
Our loneliness I say. Its our loneliness I am speaking about,
Is a axe in our hands
That over your heads is revolving revolving revolving revolving”

The same year, 1980, Gogou published her second poetic collection, “Idionimo”. The title of the collection referred to Law No.410/1976 which fortified the security forces against protesters and the regime itself against strikes etc. The law was dubbed “idionimo” by anarchists and leftists at the time, a word referring to the law passed in the late 1920s by the liberal PM Eleftherios Venizelos which ordered the expulsion of communists to barren island camps. In the poetical collection Gogou attacked the Communist Party of Greece (KKE) for treason of the struggle. The accusations came as the youth of the Party, KNE, had formed a special force, the Communist Youth for the Restoration of Order (KNAT rhyming with MAT, the riot police) used to brutally repressed any attempt of autonomy and anti-police violence during the first university occupation of 1979-1980. Anarchist magazines like “The rooster crows at dawn” at the time indicated that KNE actually tortured anarchists in special rooms of the Polytechnic. The 1979-1980 university occupations against the educational law No.815 was a sort of a greek May ’68, with the youth for the first time massively mocking communist and leftist orthodoxy, especially KNE and EKKE, the numerous Maoist Party that had already clashed with anarchists in 1977 in Exarcheia.

By 1980 Gogou was deeply involved in the sprouting anarchist culture of Exarcheia where the first Athens squat appeared on Valtetsiou street in 1981. Two years earlier, in 1979, Gogou played a central role in the big concert against police repression in Sporting, where many singers at the time took part. The concert was in demand for the immediate release of Philipos and Sofia Kiritsi, two anarchists imprisoned as terrorists by the regime. The Kiritsis affair was the first emblematic anarchist repression case, and played an important role in the creation of the milieu via the solidarity movement that arose for the liberation of the comrades. Naturally, the concert ended in riots with over 100 people arrested. It was the era of the great concert-riots which reached its climax during the spring 1980 concert of the “Police” in Sporting. It was the first rock concert in greece after the Rolling Stones concert during the junta had ended with the police entering the stage and beating the band manager after Mick Jagger threw carnations to the audience, an act deemed to be a conspiratory communist signal by the cops. During that warm night of March 1980, while all universities were occupied, 2,000 young people stormed the stadium with no tickets leading to extended clashes with the police across Patision and Aharnon avenues.

In 1982 Gogou publishes her third poem collection “Wooden overcoat” where her poetry acquired a personal touch, while in 1984 Gogou played in her last role for the film “Ostria –endgame” whose scenario she wrote herself. The film, again directed by Tassios, narrates the story of three couples who sold out their revolutionary ideas for petty-bourgeois comfort, a theme castigating the entire “generation of the Polytechnic” by then well entrenched in positions of power and exploitation.

In 1986, Gogou publishes her fourth poem collection “The Absentees” well known for the poem dedicated to the murdered anarchist transvestite Sonia:

“She bent her pale head with a sigh
and fell asleep
for ever
Above her the sky mountainous
Barren landscape –dark-
stones only and rocks not even rain…
Bride you with the plastered mouth red
Brocade hands melted handiwork
Offered pleadingly
Some lilies
Around the fresh earth your girlfriends
Sad and over-painted
Making strange noises
As craving attention
In order to play in some film
Here this ring child poem
Word of Honour
This hour that the future-ones
Learn the eagle’s flight
This hour that your forehead
Reveals what is hidden
Always the same hour
That the RED KNIVES
Kill the Different ones…”

The red knives in the poem referred to the traditional communist policy against homosexuality deemed by the KKE “a bourgeois perversion that will disappear with the revolution”. The mid 1980s was a time of fierce gay liberation struggle in greece. Only a few years before, in 1979, the right wing government had proposed a law for the displacement of homosexuals to barren island camps. The law was overturned only by way of mass grassroots reaction as well as international pressure from intellectuals like Foucault and Guattari. The struggle against the displacement law was the cradle of the gay liberation movement of the 1980s mostly led the leftist group AKOA. The most militant part of the struggle however was played by transvestites (this was their self-referential term) who even clashed with riot police forces. Sonia was an anarchist transvestite closely related to Paola, the leading anarchist trans figure of the decade who published Kraximo [Heckling] a transvestite anarchist magazine that led her to numerous arrests. Sonia’s assassination and the abandonment of her brutalised naked corpse on desolate rocks on the Attiki coastline was a emblematic call to arms affair at the time.

Gogou herself was a consistent victim of police violence and arbitrariness. In 1986 she pressed charges against General Drosoyannis, the notorious Minister of Public Order of PASOK, after being brutally beaten by riot policemen during one of the numerous anarchist marches of the time. Gogou was on the Ministry’s constant suspect list, a fact only worsened by her friendship and comradeship with Katerina Iatropoulou, the leading prison abolition anarchist figure of the time. Gogou’s struggle against repression is best depicted in her poem “Some times”-the poet can been seen in this sequence from ‘The Order’ at the initial frames, http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_tqBikHT ... re=related :

“Some times the door opens slowly and you enter.
You wear an all-white suite and linen shoes.
You bend, you tenderly put 72 coins in my palm and you leave.
I have stayed in the same position where you left me, so that you can find me again.
But a long time must have passed because my nails
Have grown long and my friends are scared of me.
Every day I cook potatoes.
I have lost my imagination.
And when I hear ‘Katerina’ I am scared
I think I have to denounce someone.
I have kept some newspaper clippings about a man they claimed was you.
I know the papers lie, because they say they shot you at the feet.
I know they never aim at the feet.
The mind is their target.
Hold it together, eh?”

In 1988, Katerina published her fifth book titled “The Month of Frozen Grapes”, a collection of 38 poems many of them consisting of a couple of verses, or even a single line. The collection reflected a time of ravaging psychological anguish that led Gogou in and out of clinics for the rest of her life. A characteristic poem (no.17) reads:

“I was a tree and I broke
They broke all my branches
Because there found refuge all the lost children
So as to play the hanged.”

Finally in 1990, Katerina published her last book “The Return Journey” which combined both her earlier political and social penetrating gaze and her existential angst. In one page of the book a hand-drawn box contains five names that marked the birth of the anarchist movement in greece, five men who died by police bullets, the urban guerrillas Kasimis, Tsoutsouvis and Prekas, the 15 year old boy Kaltezas shot by a cop in 1985 during the Polytechnic anniversary march, and Tsironis, the eccentric revolutionary doctor who had proclaimed his appartment a free state and shot down by special forces. The prose-poem above the drawing reads:

“The terror of the silent danger of the freezing silence that climbs the steps with proplasmatic faces, who slowly move in line. The hunted down knows. He has great pains behind the ears and deep in the stomach. The features change, he becomes younger, more handsome, he enters the final clash, he climbs gloriously to his god. All the more as the cause for his persecution included the justice of ever more people. He is no more in pain. Now terror sits on the shoulders of his hunters.
Now they will take aim.
Now they will murder.
They murder.
Their human face took its form in conscious retreat. They will devour each other in eternal fire to eternity. The angels get ever more numerous”.

Katerina Gogou died on October 3 1993 at the age of 53 due to an overdose of pills and alcohol, the last among the triad of radical poet-singers (alongside Pavlos Sidiropoulos and Nikolas Asimos) to exit the changing stage of Exarcheia. Her funeral gathered thousands of people. A lost poem of Katerina unearthed and published in her recent biography reveals her unwavering commitment to anarchy:

“Don’t you stop me. I am dreaming.
We lived centuries of injustice bent over.
Centuries of loneliness.
Now don’t. Don’t you stop me.
Now and here, for ever and everywhere.
I am dreaming freedom.
Though everyone’s
All-beautiful uniqueness
To reinstitute
The harmony of the universe.
Lets play. Knowledge is joy.
Its not school conscription.
I dream because I love.
Great dreams in the sky.
Workers with their own factories
Contributing to world chocolate making.
I dream because I KNOW and I CAN.
Banks give birth to “robbers”.
Prisons to “terrorists”.
Loneliness to “misfits”.
Products to “need”
Borders to armies.
All caused by property.
Violence gives birth to violence.
Don’t now. Don’t you stop me.
The time has come to reinstitute
the morally just as the ultimate praxis.
To make life into a poem.
And life into praxis.
It is a dream that I can I can I can
I love you
And you do not stop me nor am I dreaming. I live.
I reach my hands
To love to solidarity
To Freedom.
As many times as it takes all over again.
I defend ANARCHY.

“She is dangerous – when god is bringing down the world with hail and rain she comes out on the streets without socks and whistles at the men she throws stones at the police cars and lies like a squirrel on trees lighting her cigarette with thunders.
The last time she was spotted at the same date and year in three different places – based on valid information the blown up bridge of Manhattan the delivery of weapons to anarchocommunist movements as well as the exportation of top secret state information are to be attributed to the same person. She is believed to be wearing a red or black military woolly jumper childish pearl ribbons in her hair with her hands in the pockets of a borrowed jacket.
Place of birth: unknown
Sex: unknown
Vocation: unknown
Religion: atheist
Eye colour: unknown
Name: Sofia Viky Maria Olia Niki Anna Effie Argyro
Darius Darius. To all patrol cars Attention she is armed. Dangerous. Armed. Dangerous
Her name is Sofia Viky Maria Olia Niki Anna Effie Argyro
And she is Beautiful Beautiful Beautiful Beautiful my god…”
(From the collection Idionimo, 1980)

[JackRiddler]

(Poster: "The Cops Sell the Heroine.")

[JackRiddler]

Well, I wish I had stealth mod privileges, I'd use them responsibly, like to post the improved version of my Monaksia translation.

She's still influencing me. Today I was writing some message about a place in Astoria where the Greek guidos go. A few minutes later:

The Neolea (The Youth). At Avenue, on Thirtieth Avenue. Astoria.

Yes, they're still neolea, in kaffeneia, with sculpted hair. They watch Olimpiakos,
Bonnaventura, clutch sunglasses and cigarette packs, make tight-outfit
Peacock displays, squeal and speak of Real Estate; with a Silent Hunger
For Plateia Eleftheria, Korridalos, 1997, the Greek bubble, taxis,
Astoria to Mikrolimano, still the old airports, Peristeri beckons, past the doormen
Another seeking, like all nights the someones seek; they do not seek, they seek.
Until they blink at the dawn's rosy fingers amid the concrete blocks.
Most days they work. Then, now. They go to Yoga. It's all good.
I'm great, thank you.

(May 2013)

And here's the superior monaksia, in case anyone (inconceivable) ever cares:

The Loneliness (Η μοναξιά, 1981)

loneliness...
Does not have the dismal color in her eyes
Of your girlfriend floating in the sky.
She will not ramble, aimless, lazy
Shaking her gambs at concert halls
And inside the freezing museums.
She is not your yellow pictures of “good” old times,
Or the mothballs in grand-ma-ma’s chests,
Purple ribbons and strawhats.
She does not spread her legs and give strangled squeals,
Gazing like a cow, with rapid sighs
And matching lingerie.
The Loneliness.
She has the color of the Pakistanis, this loneliness.
And she shall be accounted, dish by dish,
Along with every broken fragment at the bottom of the stairwell.
She stands upright, patiently, in line:
Pittsburgh – Santa Barbara – Red Hill
Touba – Crossroads – Calamary Point*
Below any color of sky
Her head sweats.
Now she ejaculates, screaming, breaking windows with chains,
Occupies the Means of Production,
Puts the Torch to Private Property!
Now she is the Visitors’ Hall, on Sundays, at the prisons,
The same shuffle-in-the-yard for convicts and revolutionaries.
Now she is sold and bought, minute by minute, breath by breath
At the slavemarkets of Earth – here, nearby, is Kotzia,
The square where men are traded.
Arise in the morning.
Awaken to see it.
She is a poutana in the ruined houses
A nightwatch for the soldiers
And the final, final,
Endless kilometres of the NATIONAL ROAD – CENTER CITY
Lined with the trapped flesh from Bulgaria.
And when her blood congeals
And she can bear no more
Of her kind being sold out
She dances the Zem-be-ki-ko barefoot, on the tables
Holding in her stiff-blue hands
A well-sharpened hatchet.
loneliness
The Loneliness, I say to us. Of ours, I tell.
It is a hatchet in our hands
Above your heads: watch it turn, watch it turn


* In original:
Bournazi - Ayia Varvara - Kokkinia
Touba - Stavroupoli - Kalamaria

Adapted from the Greek by Nikos.Evangelos, 2013.
Astoria - Melbourne - Toronto
Chicago - Cape Town - Beirut