Poetry

 Vernal Symphony - Yiannis Ritsos

Poecia: Miguel Hernández
Música: Joan Manuel Serrat

He came with three wounds:
the one of love,
the one of death,
the one of life.
With three wounds he comes:
the one of life,
the one of love,
the one of death.
With three wounds, me:
the one of life,
the one of death,
the one of love.

Pablo Neruda - The heights of Macchu Picchu

Arise to birth with me my brother.
Give me your hand out of the depths sown by your sorrows.
You will not return from these stone fastnesses,
You will not emerge from subterranean time.
Your rasping voice will not come back,
nor your pierced eyes rise from their sockets.

Look at me from the depths of the earth, 
tiller of fields, weaver, reticent shepard,
groom of totemic guanacos,
mason high on your treacherous scaffolding,
jeweler with crushed fingers,
farmer anxious among his seedlings,
potter wasted among his clays --
bring to the cup of this new life
your acient burial sorrows.
Show me your blood and your furrow;
say to me: here I was scourged
because a gem was dull or because the earth
failed to give up in time it`s tithe of corn or stone.
Point out to me the rock on which you stumbled,
the wood they used to crucify your body.
Strike the old flints to kindle ancient lamps, 
lightup the whips glued to your wounds throughout 
the centuries and light the axes gleeming with your blood.
I come to speak for your dead mouths. 
Throughout the earth let dead lips congregate
out of the depths spin this long night to me
as if I rode at anchor here with you.
And tell me everything, tell chain by chain,
and link by link, and step by step;
sharpen the knives you kept hidden away,
thrust them into my breast, into my hands,
like a torrent of sunbursts, 
an Amazon of buried jaguars, 
and leave me cry; hours, days, years
blind ages, stellar centuries. 

And give me silence, give me water, hope.
Give me the struggle, the iron, the volcanos.
Let bodies cling like magnets to my body.
Come quickly to my veins and to my mouth. 
Speak through my speech, and through my blood.

~ Rainer Maria Rilke ~

Psalm of Life - (What The Heart Of The Young Man Said To The Psalmist)

C.P.Cavafy - The first Step

The young poet Evmenis
complained one day to Theocritus:
"I've been writing for two years now
and I've composed only one idyll.
It's my single completed work.
I see, sadly, that the ladder
of Poetry is tall, extremely tall;
and from this first step I'm standing on now
I'll never climb any higher."
Theocritus retorted: "Words like that
are improper, blasphemous.
Just to be on the first step
should make you happy and proud.
To have reached this point is no small achievement:
what you've done already is a wonderful thing.
Even this first step
is a long way above the ordinary world.
To stand on this step
you must be in your own right
a member of the city of ideas.
And it's a hard, unusual thing
to be enrolled as a citizen of that city.
Its councils are full of Legislators
no charlatan can fool.
To have reached this point is no small achievement:
what you've done already is a wonderful thing

Yiannis Ritsos have said about poetry that is limitless and timeless as it expresses the desire of all people to extend consiousness and existence into Eternity

Ardor for death so enflamed me that my radiance returned
to the sun,
And it sends me back into the perfect syntax of stone and
air.
Well then, he whom I sought I am.
0  flaxen summer, prudent autumn,
Slightest winter,
Life pays the obol of an olive leaf
And in a night of fools once again confirms with a small
cricket

The lawfulness of the Unhoped-for. 

Odyssas Elytis wrote about his poetry: “I consider poetry a source of innocence full of revolutionary forces. It is my mission to direct these forces against a world my conscience cannot accept, precisely so as to bring that world through continual metamorphoses into greater harmony with my dreams. I am referring here to a contemporary kind of magic whose leads to the discovery of our true reality. It is for this reason that I believe, to the point of idealism, that I am moving in a direction which has never been attempted until now. In the hope of obtaining a freedom from all constraints and the justice which could be identified with absolute light"

I lived the beloved name

In the shade of the aged olive tree

In the roaring of the lifelong sea          "Sun the First"  O.Elytis

I was given the Modern Greek language;

a poor house on Homer's beaches.

My only care my language on Homer's beaches.

Seabream there and perch, 

windbeaten verbs,

green sea-currents amid the azure currents

which I felt light up in my viscera

sponges, medusae

with the first words of the Sirens

pink shells with their first black tremors.

My only care my language with the first black shivers.

Pomegranates there, quinces

swarthy gods, uncles and cousins

pouring olive oil in huge jars;

and breaths from the ravines smelling

of chaste-tree and lentisk

broom and ginger root

with the first cheeps of the finches,

sweet psalmodies with the very first Glory to Thee.

My only care my language with the very first Glory to Thee!  

"Aξιον Εστι" Odysseas Elytis          Translated by Jeffrey Carson and Nicos Sarris

Here then am I 
created for the young Korai and the Aegean islands,
    lover of the deer’s leaping,
initiate in the Mystery of olive leaves,
    sun-drinker and locust-killer

I lived the beloved name
In the shade of the aged olive tree
In the roaring of the lifelong sea

Those who stoned me live no longer
With their stones I built a fountain
To its brink green girls come
Their lips descend from the dawn
Their hair unwinds far into the future

Swallows come, infants of the wind
They drink, they fly, so that life goes on
The threat of the dream becomes a dream
Pain rounds the good cape
No voice is lost in the breast of the sky

O deathless sea, tell what you are whispering
I reach your morning mouth early
On the peak where your love appears
I see the will of the night spilling stars
The will of the day nipping the earth’s shoots

I saw a thousand wild lilies on the meadows of life
A thousand children in the true wind
Beautiful strong children who breathe out kindness
And know how to gaze at the deep horizons
When music raises the islands

I carved the beloved name
In the shade of the aged olive tree
In the roaring of the lifelong sea.  

from Sun the First (translated by Edmund Keeley and Philip Sherrard) - all collages by Odysseas Elytis

Below, on the daisy's small threshing floor

The young honeybees have struck up a crazy dance

The sun sweats, the water trembles

Sesame seeds of fire slowly fall

Tall stalks of corn bend the unburnt sky

Beyond in the golden millet tomboy's drowse

With bronze lips, naked bodies

Scorched on the tinderbox of fervor

Hey! Heey! The carriage drivers pass jouncing by

Horses sink in the oil of descending slopes

Horses dream

Of a cool city with marble troughs

Or of a clovercloud ready to burst

On a hill of slender trees that scalds their ears 

On the tambourines of large fields that set their dung to dancing

Beyond in the golden millet tomboy's drowse

Their sleep smells of bonfires burning

The sun quivers between their teeth

Nutmeg sweetly drips from their armpits

And a drunken heat haze staggers with heavy strokes

On the heather the everlasting and the sweet-smelling jujube tree

                                 Odysseas Elytis -  from  Sun the first(transl. Kimon Friar)

 In a passage of his Open Book he gave three images to illustrate the way he experienced the mystery of light:

'Once, at high noon, I saw a lizard climb upon a stoneand then, in broad daylight, commence a veritable dance, with a multitude of tiny movements, in honour of light. There and then I deeply sensed the mystery of light. At another time I experienced this mystery while at sea between the islands of Naxos and Paros. Suddenly in the distance I saw dolphins that approached and passed us, leaping above the water to the height of our deck. The final image is that of a young woman on whose naked breast a butterfly descended one day at noon while cicadas filled the air with their noise. This was for me another revelation of the mystery of light. When I speak of solar metaphysics, this is exactly what I mean.'

In the poem cicadas Elytis listens to the sound of the cicadas 

zi - zi -zi -zi - zi- zi - zi     which in Greek means

lives lives lives lives lives lives lives.

Vivere - vivere - vivere !     and Elytis asks them:  Hey you cicadas my angels,

greetings and cheers to you,  is the Sun King alive?  

and they all reply at once !   zi zi zi zi zi zi zi zi    the Sun-king lives  ! 

Drinking the sun of Corinth
Reading the marble ruins
Striding across vineyards and seas
Sighting along my harpoon
At votive fish that elude me
I found those leaves that the psalm of the sun memorizes
The living land that desire rejoices to open.

I drink water, cut fruit,
Plunge my hand through the wind’s foliage
Lemon trees quicken the pollen of summer days
Green birds cut through my dreams
And I leave, my eyes filled
With a boundless gaze where the world becomes
Beautiful again from the beginning according to the heart's measure!

                                                       Odysseas Elytis -  from  Sun the first(transl. Kimon Friar)

Odysseas Elytis was the poet of the Aegean Sea and Sun. The blue Aegean sea and the unaltered azure sky of the Greek islands, the glorious infinite light, the white small houses, the olive trees and the churches, ancient amphorae and ruins, summer high noons and the winds define the scene where life is liberated and triumphant, mystical and deeply meaningful. The influence of the sea and the sun is diffused in almost all his poems. 

"Orientations" published in 1936, was Elytis's first volume of poetry. Filled with images of light and purity, the work earned for its author the title of the "sun-drinking poet." Edmund Keeley, a frequent translator of Elytis's work, observed that these "first poems offered a surrealism that had a distinctly personal tone and a specific local habitation. The tone was lyrical, humorous, fanciful, everything that is young." In a review of a later work, The Sovereign Sun, a writer for the Virginia Quarterly Review echoed Keeley's eloquent praise: "An intuitive poet, who rejects pessimism and engages in his surrealistic images the harsh realities of life, Elytis is a voice of hope and naked vigor. There is light and warmth, an awakening to self, body, and spirit, in Elytis."

Eros

The Archipelago

and the prow of its foams

And the Gulls of its dreams

On its highest mast the sailor waves 

A song

Eros

Its song

And the horizons of its voyage

And the echo of its nostalgia

On her wettest rock the betrothed awaits

A ship

Eros

Its ship

And the nonchalance of its summer winds

And the jib of its hope

On its lightest undulation an island cradles

the coming

Τhe playing waters 

In shady passages

Speak the dawn with their kisses

Which begins

Horizon_

And the wild doves vibrate

A sound in their cave

Blue waking in the found

Of day

Sun_

The northwester gives the sail

To the sea

Caresses of hair

To the carefreeness of its dream

Dew_

Wave in the light

Again gives birth to the eyes

Where life sails toward

Far-seeing

Life_

The poet, however, disagreed with such descriptions of his work. He suggested that "my theory of analogies may account in part for my having been frequently called a poet of joy and optimism. This is fundamentally wrong. I believe that poetry on a certain level of accomplishment is neither optimistic nor pessimistic. It represents rather a third state of the spirit where opposites cease to exist. There are no more opposites beyond a certain level of elevation. Such poetry is like nature itself, which is neither good nor bad, beautiful nor ugly; it simply 'is'. Such poetry is no longer subject to habitual everyday distinctions." 

Before I had eyes you were light

Before Eros love

And when the kiss took you

A woman

                                   Orientations - O.Elytis

Elytis - Anniversary poem (video from Semester at the Sea in the MV Explorer - excellent)

https://vimeo.com/44813877

I have brought my life as far as this

On this point when the youth on the rocks,

Ever by the sea

Ever restless with the sea, breast

To breast with the wind

Where can a man go

When is nothing but a man

Reckoning in dews his green moments,

In waters his visions of his hearing,

In winds his pangs of remorse

Oh Life

Of a child who becomes a man

Ever by the sea

When the sun teaches him

To take a breathe there

Where vanishes the seagull's shadow 

I have brought my life as far as this,

Stone vowed to the liquid element

Further off than the islands,

Lower than the waves

Neighbor to the anchors

-When the keels pass a new obstacle

And tear it with passion and conquer it

And hope with all her dolphin dawns

Gain of the sun in a man's heart-

The nets of doubt draw in

A figure of salt painfully chisled

Indifferent, white

Turning to the sea the void of the eyes

Sustaining the infinite

                                            Orientations - Odysseas Elytis

 Helios, Hyperion's boy, was coming down

into the golden bowl to traverse ocean

and reach holy dark night's depth  (Stesichorus)

“This land, although not my native land,
Will be remembered forever.
And the sea's lightly iced,
Unsalty water.

The sand on the bottom is whiter than chalk,
The air is heady, like wine,
And the rosy body of the pines
Is naked in the sunset hour.

And the sunset itself on such waves of ether
That I just can't comprehend
Whether it is the end of the day, the end of the world,
Or the mystery of mysteries in me again.” 
              Anna Akchmatova

Marina  -  Odysseas Elytis  from "Little Cyclades"

Give me some basil, mint and vervain
To smell until I nearly burst,
And kissing you with all their perfume
What am I to remember first?

A golden fountain with the white doves
A shining sword of archangel,
A garden underneath the stardust
Or darkness of the deepest well

That night when crossing the horizon
I saw you to the other side
Of heaven and beheld you rising,
A sister of the morning light...

Marina, green star I go under,
Marina, first of morning rays,
Marina, my wild dove of wonder
And lily of the summer days.

Marina of the rocks - Odysseas Elytis

You have a taste of tempest on your lips - But where did you wander
All day long in the hard reverie of stone and sea? 
An eagle-bearing wind stripped the hills
Stripped your longing to the bone
And the pupils of your eyes received the message of chimera
Spotting memory with foam!
Where is the familiar slope of short September
On the red earth where you played, looking down
At the broad rows of the other girls
The corners where your friends left armfuls of rosemary.

But where did you wander
All night long in the hard reverie of stone and sea?
I told you to count in the naked water its luminous days
On your back to rejoice in the dawn of things
Or again to wander on yellow plains
With a clover of light on you breast, iambic heroine.

You have a taste of tempest on your lips
And a dress red as blood
Deep in the gold of summer
And the perfume of hyacinths - But where did you wander?

Descending toward the shores, the pebbled bays?
There was cold salty seaweed there
But deeper a human feeling that bled
And you opened your arms in astonishment naming it
Climbing lightly to the clearness of the depths
Where your own starfish shone.

Listen. Speech is the prudence of the aged
And time is a passionate sculptor of men
And the sun stands over it, a beast of hope
And you, closer to it, embrace a love
With a bitter taste of tempest on your lips.

It is not for you, blue to the bone, to think of another summer,
For the rivers to change their bed
And take you back to their mother
For you to kiss other cherry trees
Or ride on the northwest wind.

Propped on the rocks, without yesterday or tomorrow,
Facing the dangers of the rocks with a hurricane hairstyle
You will say farewell to the riddle that is yours.

Prosanatolismoi, 1940 - Orientations 
© Translation: Edmund Keeley and Philip Sherrard 

The Concert of the Hyacinths - Odysseas Elytis (translated by Jeffrey Carson and Nicos Sarris)

Ι Stand a little closer to the silence, and gather the hair of this night who dreams her body is naked.

She has many horizons, many compasses, and a fate that tirelessly invalidates all her fifty-two cards every time.

Afterward she begins again with something else-with your hand, to which she gives pearls so it may find a desire, an islet of sleep.

Stand a little closer to the silence and embrace the huge anchor that rules in the deep.

In a while it will be among the clouds. And you will not understand, but will weep, weep for me to kiss you,

and when I go to open a rent in the lie, to open a small blue skylight in intoxication, you will bite me.

Young, jealous shadow of my soul, genetrix of a music under moonlight Stand a little closer to me.

Here-in desires' early whispering, you felt for the first time the painful happiness of living! Big uncertain birds tore the virginities of your worlds.

On a spread -out sheet the swans saw their future songs and from every fold of night they set out

tossing their dreams in the waters, identifying their existence with the existence of embraces they anticipated.

But what were they seeking, these steps that did not efface their forests but stood in the glaucous socket of the sky and of your eyes?

What starry sin approached the beats of your despair?

Neither the lake, nor its sensitivity, nor the flammable ghost of two hands in agreement had the luck to confront such a rosy turmoil.

Embryo of a more luminous success-day carved with effort on the traces of the unknown.

You pay the tear, and it gets away from the sun.

And you who chew your hours like oleander become the omen of a tender voyage into immortality

The Monogram (1971) - Odysseas Elytis  

The Monogram was written between 1969 and 1971 in Paris by the self-exiled poet. Ιt is considered to be one of the world's masterpieces of dramatic love poetry     

The Monogram stands as a celebration of Elytis’ following own words: I introduced to poetry a new method of understanding the world through the senses… To me the senses do not necessarily carry erotic implications, as they have an air of holiness. Furthermore we can say that every reader who reads The Monogram may discover the endless dimensions of love; thus he comes closer, in a way, to immortality.

Thus I speak for you and me 

Because I love you and in love I know

How to enter like the Full Moon

From everywhere, for your small foot on the huge sheets

How to pluck jasmine flowers – and I have the power

To blow and move you asleep

Through moonlit passages and the sea’s secret arcades

Hypnotized trees with silvering spiderwebs 

The waves have heard of you

 How you caress, how you kiss

How you say in a whisper the “what” and the “eh”

Around the neck around the bay

Always we the light and shadow

Always you the little star and always I the dark boat

Always you the harbor and I the beacon on the right

The wet dockwall and the gleam on the oars

High in the house with the vine arbors

The bound-up rosebushes, the water that feels cold

Always you the stone statue and always I the lengthening shadow

The half-closed window shutter you, I the wind that opens it

Because I love you and I love you

Always you the coin and I the adoration that cashes it:

So much for the night, so much for the roar in wind

So much for the droplet in the air, so much for the quietude

Around the despotic sea

Arch of the sky with the stars

So much for your least breath

That I have nothing more

Amid the four walls, the ceiling, the floor

To cry out of you and so my own voice strikes me

To smell of you and so men turn wild

Because men can’t endure the untried

The brought from elsewhere and it’s early, hear me

It’s too early yet in this world my love

 To speak of you and me.                                            Monogram III

It’s too early yet in this world, hear me?                               

The monsters have not yet been tamed, hear me

My lost blood and the pointed, hear me

Knife

Like a ram that runs amid the skies

And snaps the boughs of the stars, hear me

It’s I, hear me

I love you, hear me

I hold you and lead you and dress you

In Ophelia’s white bridal gown, hear me

Where do you leave me, where are you going and who, hear me

Who holds your hand over the floods

The day will come, hear me

The enormous lianas and the lava of volcanoes

Will bury us and thousands of years later, hear me

They’ll make us luminous fossils, hear me

For the heartlessness of men to shine, hear me

Over them

And throw us away in thousands of pieces, hear me

In the waters one by one, hear me

I count my bitter pebbles, hear me

And time is a great church, hear me

Where sometime the figures, hear me

Of Saints

Weep real tears, hear me

The bells open on high, hear me

A deep passage for me to pass through

The angels wait with candles and funeral psalms

I go nowhere, hear me

Either no one or we two together, hear me

This flower of tempest and, hear me

Of love

 Once and for always we cut it, hear me

And it cannot come into bloom otherwise, hear me

In another earth, in another star, hear me

 The soil, the very air we touched

Are no more, hear me

And no gardener was so fortunate in other times

To put forth a flower amid such a winter, hear me

And such northwinds, only we, hear me In the middle of the sea

From only the wish for love, hear me Raised a whole island, hear me

With caves and capes and flowering cliffs

Listen, listen

Who speaks to the waters and who weeps – hear?

Who seeks the other, who cries out – hear?

It’s I who cry out and it’s I who weep, hear me

 I love you, I love you, hear me

                          Monogram IV        Translated by Jeffrey Carson and Nicos Sarris

Οdysseas Elytis - Monogram VII

I have mapped out an island In Paradise 

That looks like you and a house by the sea

With a large bed and a small door 

I have cast a sound into the bottomless depths of the sea

To look at myself each morning when I arise

And see the half of you passing over the watery floor

As I weep for your other half in paradise

 The blood of love has robed me in purple 

And joys never seen before have covered me in shade. 

I've become corroded in the south wind of humankind 

Mother far away, my Everlasting Rose. 

On the open sea they lay in wait for me, 
With triple-masted men-of-war they bombarded me, 
My sin that I too had a love of my own 
Mother far away, my Everlasting Rose. 
Once in July her large eyes 
Half-opened, deep down my entrails, to light up 
The virgin life for a single moment 
Mother far away, my Everlasting Rose. 
And since that day the wrath of ages 
Has turned on me, shouting out the curse: 
"He who saw you, let him live in blood and stone" 
Mother far away, my Everlasting Rose. 
Once again I took the shape of my native country, 
I grew and flowered among the stones. 
And the blood of killers I redeem with light 
Mother far away, my Everlasting Rose. 
                                                                                THE AXION ESTI, by Odysseus Elytis (1911-1996) Translated by Edmund Keeley and George Savidis

Wisdom by Sara Teasdale

When I have ceased to break my wings 
Against the faultiness of things, 
And learned that compromises wait 
Behind each hardly opened gate, 
When I have looked Life in the eyes, 
Grown calm and very coldly wise, 
Life will have given me the Truth, 
And taken in exchange my youth.          

We are wanderers in the earth, but
only a few of us in each generation
have discovered the life of charity, the
living from day to day, receiving
our gifts gratefully through grace,
and rendering them, multiplied
through grace, to the giver. That
is the meaning of your expansive, out-
ward arching gesture of the arm in
the landing; the graceful rendering,
the gratitude and giving.

                                        Robert Lax - (excerpt from Mogadar's book)

 They danced down the streets like dingledodies, and I shambled after as I've been doing all my life after people who interest me, because the only people for me are the mad ones, the ones who are mad to live, mad to talk, mad to be saved, desirous of everything at the same time, the ones that never yawn or say a commonplace thing, but burn, burn, burn like fabulous yellow roman candles exploding like spiders across the stars and in the middle you see the blue centerlight pop and everybody goes "Awww!" 

Jack kerouac   from "On the Road"