LIGHT AT HALF MAST: POEMS FROM 15 HIPPOCRATES ST. – Thomas Ioannou

Translated from the Greek by Yannis Goumas, from Ippokratous 15, Thomas Ioannou’s award winning collection.

AUTOPSY

When they lifted him out of the sea
It took him days to dry up

They pounded him like an octopus
For his soul to soften somewhat
But he wouldn’t utter
A single word
He didn’t want to be cleared
Of his last wish

And the saltiness on his body
You’d think it was sea sweat
As he went in and out of it
With the fury of lovers
Who know that each time
Might well be the last one

Between his teeth
He dourly held a conch
Of the sort he collected as a child

A memento of the deep
A talisman for those
Who wished to walk
On the sea

HE KEEPS HIS DISTANCE

He didn’t manage to emerge able-bodied
From life’s incidents
Dismembered between
The now of words
The ever of dots
And the body’s never

Having suffered a series of amputations
A consolidated language of existence
Approached the ordinary man
Without digs and without extremes

He now keeps his distance
Avoiding body to body clashes
In memory’s districts of ill repute
Not for a moment does he have words with the sky
He hangs his head in shame
He wants the earth to swallow him
Having once believed in beauty

He is careful crossing time
As if stepping on the dead
Lest a mine should stir up
And then who’ll defuse
All this age-old pestilence?
And then how will he maintain whole
The well-nigh comic disability of existence?

PRAYER

The act was ripped off my hands
Leaving my fingers numb
And on the palms a little sweat
To slide my will

Of my dreams I could retain
Only a loose thread from their clothes
Not even a sigh risen
Like a prayer that had lost its faith

Land and sea
Were separated inside me

And the entire future
Flowed like a tear from my eyes

WITHOUT MY FUTURE

I come without my future

Poets I admired

Turned their back on me
Girls I loved
Feed statues in squares
Petrified desires
That became public spectacles

At night I keep awake
Singing dreams out of tune
Innocent I never returned
On beaches I had laid
In the moonlight

I no longer recognize
The voice of my faith

I am not he
Who the cock calls
Every dawn

BORN PERPLEXED

Born perplexed

We don’t know
What to do
With our mouth and hands
And we smoke one fear
After another

We don’t know
How to speak and write
And we use poetry
This dialect of the deceased
Making smoke signs nowhere

We don’t know
How to kiss and touch
And love turned
To ashes that God
Shook off his clothes

MELTING POINT

It’s easy to talk about the boiling point
To hover between
A moist and an aerial condition
To rise nonchalantly
Or evoke as relieving
A fit of anger
Every time you commit
A series of flesh crimes

But who knows
Of the soul’s melting point?
The point where begins
The countdown of sobs
And all records
Of human endurance are broken
There where God’s chronometers are smashed
Incapable of following
The mortals’ frenzied course

In such extreme circumstances
Perhaps only poetry
With its rusty tools can
Record with precision
The isoelectric line of existence

15 HIPPOCRATES STREET

You are wearing again the same body
But you forgot to button up
The contentious wound
Provoking the past
To intervene

But this stands waterproof
On the opposite shore
It won’t consent to time’s arbitration
It withdraws and its level
Continues lowering in our life
Leaving our bodies unprotected

And our eyes
Fail to meet
Bridges that didn’t reach the other shore
And remained hands stretched out
But, alas!, time catches up with them
And not an inkling of pressing
Is left to the touch

And though you were saying that a river
Would cover us, a flowing impetuous passion
Swept the fragments
The mouth now dry
And our words squeezed out

What were you doing in Hippocrates Street
With your hair loose?
A swarm of fears
Crossing the stillness

The day delayed on your face
And your fingers were forgotten
On my overcoat
As if looking for my button

God was slow
Moving to another plan
It got dark
And standing there
Was an intrusive sun

Light at half mast

These poems by Thomas Ioannou were first published in Italian translation in La Macchina Sognante N. 4 and N. 7

Thomas Ioannou was born in Arta in 1979. He grew up in Preveza and studied Medicine at the National and Kapodistrian University of Athens. He works now as a neurologist. With his first book of poetry, Ippokratous 15, published in 2011 from Saixpirikon Publications, he won the Best New Poet Award for 2012, given by the Greek State and the Greek Ministry of Culture. His poems and essays have appeared in literary magazines, in the daily press and in various anthologies. He is a member of the editorial team of the quarterly literary magazine Ta Poiitika. His poems have been translated into English, German, French and Spanish. Within 2016, Ippokratous 15 will appear in French, in a bilingual edition from Desmos publications.