“People live down here and there’s you gaping at the
view”
My love is scolding me
Hallelujah; loneliness has done us in
Ashes is hardness in our lungs Hallelujah
Where are the people, where their fires
“Plane-trees our mistakes”
My love breaks my heart
Half in the shade half in the light
With the ocean’s sandals as ploughs on its feet
Like water that doesn’t hold it against gurgling time
My love is a world of no illusions
Nature’s quadrilateral garment
Male and female elucidation
Verbs that arrange significance
Enamel in beauty’s mould
The earth’s basements boil and islands pour out
My hands take on a feeling
The heart’s cables boil and conscience pours out
My blasphemous love doesn’t parley with the govern-
ment
It swarms up summer’s pulse, up the mast of truth
My love Jerusalem New York, Peking, Mecca, Poor
Suburbs
My love has removed the European locket from its
neck
By word of mouth comes the silence of change
My love, a donor of surprise and unforeseen change
Not in the programme
My love pays its taxes
By painting densely populated curtains
Unscrewing burnt candles from human failures
Saving nooses of certain throttling
Correcting equations on the blackboard of souls
Washing away the blood on market floors
Love and only love is not an invention, man’s making
Magnetic storms don’t make cockeyed the stars’
kisses
My love cannot be threatened
Frigates of birds sound the turning of thought
The bitterness of irrevocable ice and the ransom
For the shores’ lost sight
My love shouts that summer’s funeral should be at
the public expense
It averts the evil eye when bankers dream
This yes, it’s social justice!
Your god is smaller than his fame
My love is whatever turns, without cuts, proud and
vigorous
in the next life
Bridles on voters of naught
My love is whatever shudders without wearing
It’s the chapel where ruined loves kiss each other
longingly
The lid of the transparent world
The “no” and the “don’t”
My love is the scanning, the approach, the touch
The relentless rain and shelter
My love assumes responsibility
My love is free speech
Whether or not one believes in God
- a question as beastly as to be or not to be -
It is certain that, when the prophet passes near
The planet ideally distanced from the Sun,
The meaning becomes clear, especially to the western
man,
Of love as free will in the fate of the world
Lament as essential for the upbringing of spring
Of studying hope to intercept futility
Of devastation as a requirement for rebirth
Of good and evil as diagnosis and prognosis
But also vice versa.
The answer to the riddle of the Sphinx
From now on is
“The present human being”.
Christos Koukis is a poet and the director of the
Crete International Poetry Festival. He lives and
works in Athens, Greece.
