ELEGY

(by Nikos Gatsos) Some time God must have smiled at the fire inside your eye

The Spring must have clasped its heart like an ancestral seashore's pearl.

Now as you sleep shining

In the frozen fields where the wild grapevines

Turned into embalmed wings, marble pigeons,

Silent children of anticipation --

I wish you would arrive one evening like a tearful cloud,

Stone's vapor, olive's rime

For on your chaste forehead

Sometimes I would see

The snow of sheep and lilies

But you went through life like a tear of the sea

Like a Summer's shine and May's last rain

Despite of you too having once been one of her mauve waves

A bitter pebble of hers

A small swallow out of her into a desolate forest

With no bell's sound at dawn, no lantern's light at dusk

With your warm heart turned abroad

Toward the worn teeth of the alien seashore

Toward the wrecked isles of seals and wild cherry trees.

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