For Efessos by Odysseus Elytis
"Letters will exist. People will read and grab History’s tail once more."
For Efessos
Freely beside me the vineyards are running and unbridled Remains the sky. Wildfires trade pinecones and one Donkey bolts uphill for a little cloud St. Heracleitos’s day and something’s up That even noses can’t diagnose: Tricks of a shoeless wind snagging the hem Of Fate’s nightgown and leaving Us in the open air of capricorns exposed Secretly I go with all the loot in my mind For a life unbowed from the beginning. No candles no chandeliers Only a gold anemone’s engagement for a diamond Feeling its way to where? Asking what? Our moon’s half- shadow needs You to console even the graves Homoethnic or not. The crux is that the scent of earth Lost even to bloodhounds With its weeds onions and creeks Must be restored to its idiom So what! A word contains you peasant of night’s green Efessos! Forefather sulphur phosphorus your fourteenth generation Inside the orange groves gold words Sharing the scalpel’s chisel Tents as yet unpitched others midair Lost poles suddenly grinding. Sermons Rise from the seafloor of the facing coves Twin scythes for theater or temple Fresh valley springs and other curly streams Of thus and so. If ever wisdom Planned circles of clover and dog grass Another world might live just as before your fingerprint Letters will exist. People will read and grab History’s tail once more. Just let the vineyards gallop and the sky remain Unbridled as children want it With roosters and pinecones and blue kites flags On Saint Heracleitos’s day child’s is the kingdom.
First Published in Odysseus Elytis, "For Efessos" from Eros, Eros, Eros: Selected & Last Poems. (Copper Canyon Press, 1998). Translated By Olga Broumas.