Carmelia LEONTE
IPHIGENIA
Like a stem of faith
the bones of my teenage grow.
Gods will guard me.
Pictures embodying people of the future
will be stuck to the sky high up, where there is
the spring of all things.
Crowned heads
will fill the hot gardens.
A black animal will overshadow
the earth
for I need shadow.
The mantle clings to my body.
It is too hot.
But you, father of mine,
will snatch it away with your hands
and give me to the world, as I have come.
As if you brought me into the world for the second time, more fragile,
out of your thought, lamant swaying.
AGAMEMNON
I have lost. My daughter has turned into a hart.
The dwarf sea of childhood has enveloped her
and made her abandon herself.
She suddenly wakes up, opens her eyes on the cursed shore.
The calcar profile seems to her to resemble something known , an image
in my past which I forget.
She has left me.
As if her ribs and key bones and all the vertebras
had grown in some way
I have no idea of.
Will she not be afraid when it gets dark in Olymp?
She will hide in a corner where the dirty hands of gods
Will fail to reach her. She will wait…
A day before I saw a sick ghost,
murmuring something above her head.
I wished to drive him away.
But then an indefinite link
coming right from my daughter’s heart
towards the heart of the sinister prophecy
stopped me.
On her face she has always had the light
of that who changes the centuries.
The unconfessed burden of loneliness in acceptance she has borne.
Could you believe that some orange blossoms
Have made all stand stone-still? Have they killed?
Only my daughter has passed by upright and slender
Among the hot flames.
IPHIGENIA, THE POEM OF THE HANDS
Our hands know each other.
Together they built up an absence,
they slipped inside glory with awe,
they were fundamental books which gods stooping
read.
Then they kept silent.
They clung to each other
like the lips of the dumb man in Argos.
They had visions.
You and I,
I and you
become the lines in the palm.
Someone held a light above our heads.
When I looked at it, it went out.
There came the blue of things,
to be a burden for us.
The hands we held against each other,
as when beseeching.
BLEND OF COLOURS
You have taken me out of the body of Greece,
you have unrooted me like disease,
my face you have halved
making it the unknown word of a cryptic poet,
all the poetry creators have gathered up and blown over me
their air that blends life and death,
refuge and revival.
My mantle has caught fire for life longing
but they have said
No.
I have learnt to live only by cheating words,
making them look like silk bundles
where sleep is always eternal.
I have leant to live by hating poets.
Now I have no idea about what death is.
Maybe that very enveloping in your looks?
Maybe the word in a hurry, half spoken,
never grasped?
I will have to love.
Traduceri de Olimpia IACOB
