θαλασσογραφία_Thalassography ΙΙΙ

 Odysseas Elytis poetry

 I know that all this is worthless  and that the language
 I speak doesn't have an alphabet
 
 Since the sun and the waves are a syllabic script
 which can be deciphered only in the years of sorrow and exile
 
 And the motherland  a fresco with successive overlays
 frankish or slavic which, should you try to restore,
 you are immediately sent to prison and
 held responsible

 To a crowd of foreign Powers  always through
 the intervention of your own

 As it happens for the disasters
 
 But  let's imagine that in an old days' threshing-floor
 which might be in an apartment-complex children
 are playing and  whoever loses

 Should, according to the rules, tell the others
 and give them a truth

 Then everyone ends up  holding in his
 hand a small
 
 Gift, silver poem.

 

(from "The Tree of Light and The Fourteenth Beauty")
(Translated by: Marios Dikaiakos)