When we meet you don’t know yourself.
You lean to a mirror
and see ancient faces: so
Homer’s people emerge
mouths agape, thirsty from their dark world.
Can you be sure you know them?
They want snapshots for company,
they need food, newspapers, the radio.
They fill the house. They’re hanging out of windows,
they block the street, they’re all over town.
Everything stops. What time is it?
Water dries up. And now we’re thirsty, too,
we who are outside, and then the panic starts:
Sirens, flashing lights, barricades.
(In yourself
there’s scarcely breathing space:
certainly no room for you.)
Cars, trucks, crammed with people
all heading for the mountains.
The talk’s of lifeless verbs,
of rhymes laid out in the morgue.
Our town is emptied now.
Only, a breathless horse
bolts from your eyes, steaming.
From the Greek of Yannis Kontos