THE REMNANTS OF A SILENCE

Raquel Angel-Nagler

REMEMBERING MAYAKOVSKY

TRANSLATION OF THE ORIGINAL TO GREEK:
YIANNIS RITSOS

***

PARIS, EIFEL TOWER
I walk in Paris. The boulevards widen time, it is immense,
So I am terribly alone, terribly no one.
Around me: the dance of fantasy,
The pirouettes are exquisite.
The bodies of love, the painted red tear on their face,
Clowns of love.
The fog gives shape to the eyes:
They are nowhere, and they spread everywhere.
I look for my eyes.
And you, giant tower, the miracle of lines and dimensions,
They planted you here,
So close to the guillotine of a storm,
So far from the eyes.
They saw you so much, now they see without seeing.
I would like you to walk towards somewhere else,
To be a wandering tower.
You'll be again a miracle: the steel,
The hundred small suns in each dimension,
And the miracle will be for everybody.

***

The future will come.
No one is ready for his future
But you should prepare yourself, in whatever you think, in all the motions of living.
The future is change. Time is the biggest changer.
It is not enough to be just among workers, friends,
You have to bring justice home,
To let it sit at the family table,
So that you'll be the height of a human.
And wars are never far, in a distant front,
They are also home:
The attacks of small threats, that are never really small. They bleed.
You have to heal them,
So that you'll be the height of a human.
Remember, the future will be the height of a human.
Remember, you cannot put the moth of the hours, of everyday in moth balls.
You have to air time everywhere, inside. out.
Let it breath.

***

I am a nomad in my life, a nomad in poetry.
I made the impossible; I tamed myself,
I bound the throats of my songs.
I'll come to you with new songs,
And my songs will walk towards you, always more, always deeper.
My song, heavy with time will come
Invisible as the useful, stubborn, inevitable.
My song, lives the way it dies, the way a soldier dies:
Anonymous, invisible.
Check your dictionaries, dictionaries are the history of words,
So they are also the history of humans,
You'll find words you almost forgot: T.B.C., hunger.
I grow old, ossified,
All I have is a shirt white washed, and the song.
I'll come over the gang of poetry:
Words studied as a crime,
I'll come to you, to who you are,
To the love that you need, and that needs you.

***

The human floods comes in cars, on foot, with and without shoes.
It drowns me.
It is stormy,
The flood has to hold the rails of time in order to continue.
I see you,
Your eyes red as wine, drunk wine, blind wine.
It is the wine of a dream that is not your own.
I see you,
A woman comes, among the crowd, to hold your hand.
Her hands: two exquisite flutes. They sing. The song is your song.
I see you
Because I see myself.

***

I am in heaven,
But I am still human: I am curious.
I dig a hole in a cloud,
To see what's new, what's old in the world.
Each day, I drink tea, I read the news-papers of the angels,
And like everybody else, I always spy on the new comers.
I greet them, polite as an angel.
Usually I stand in the entrance, an usher, I cut tickets
To the most ancient theatre, the most exquisite:
The theatre of the stars.
The engine of all events is here, the white petrol,
And the world is the mirror of everything.
Everybody feeds the machine of the sun,
But the engines are dying. The kill the world.
There is a dumpster where they throw
The possible that was impossible, the dead stars.
And no one is in a hurry, they trust eternity.
And yet, the train sighs on the tracks of time,
An avalanche of years in the wagons.
Maybe I am prisoner of the biggest prison: heaven.
But the person in my head, the rebel, is free.
He loves, more than anything else, life.
I don't divide what I love in hours, in days,
I don't divide my love,
I don't divide myself.

Maybe, one day,
The infinite will accept the planets,
They will be a number in the longest equation that exists.
There will be no sky to pray to.
The sky will be empty,
And the churches of the gods, will walk, utterly human,
Towards the end of time, the time inside them, in their genes,
Always more, always deeper.

***

If I could pass all the roads,
Smuggler of borders, smuggler of time.
If I could steal from a night,
Wild, in fever, some madness.
If the night could steal me
From the cave where I draw my beasts.
If I could love, beast-less,
Simple as something which is so close to the truth.

***

The purifier of the world: the night.
The hours where a body enters another,
The deepest prayer.
And the sun shines, it makes everything visible:
The forgiving, the forgiver, the non forgiven,
And it draws the same halo over their lives.
Guilt is dead.

***

You wait on a rock amidst the liquid night.
You wait for the world to appear,
To walk towards you,
To come clear, secret, shadowy, lit, inevitable,
Towards you.
You are ready, you cut with your teeth the umbilical cord to the past.
It bleeds. And the blood flows towards the world, always deeper.

***

I come small, like the toes of the ocean in my feet.
The tides bring the moon closer.
I don't resist the miniature sky, the picture of god immense.
After all, we live with the sky in our mouth,
And the rain melts it even more.
I lick the sky, clear pure, my tongue feels the textures, the substance of the sky.
It doesn't find the gods.

***

Your eyes are too small, two slits.
Your eyes can never see themselves,
But you can use a mirror:
A river, a broken glass, the gaze of someone,
And you can look out:
The exquisite mosaic of the world, the floor of everything,
The floor where you walk towards yourself, towards the others,
Always more, always better.

***

I come small, patient, inevitable,
I carry the herd of my dreams.
There is not grass enough for the herd.
I am hungry.
Some dreams are simple additions:
They add dreams to my dreams,
They add grass to the grass.
I am small, but I am endless.
I am one, and yet I am many. Many numbers.
I dream, and reality, the law of big numbers, dreams in my dream.

***

Keep your eyes open,
Big as the eyes of a child, bigger than his face, bigger than his life.
A man will come, lucid, free, inevitable.
He'll carve himself in your eyes,
The way faces carve themselves in a mirror.
It's a long time you didn't see,
But remember, you can break a mirror,
And it can break you.
Like anything else you have to learn how to see,
And mirrors are the test of fire.

***

The years in prison.
I wasn't silent,
I simply forgot how to speak.
I could give so much of what I am
For a word, for a phrase,
But in prison
You are free in your silence,
Words are the big betrayers.

***

If I were silent
Like the moment before the storm,
My words would be immense.
But, I was silent
Like someone who looks for the dimensions of a whisper.
My words are a love song to life,
They are simple, a whisper,
The way things are when they are so close to the truth.

***

Fires are red, and yet, they are black, and yet they are ash grey.
The big chameleons.
They saved you in the deep caves,
They burned you in the biggest caves: the caves inside you.
They burned violent, absolute, they forgave nothing.
Maybe all those fires are written in your genes, like pain.

***

Our fingers invented an alley in the dark,
They invented dreams to be hidden.
Wars don't tell you how to see in the dark,
But they let you see the dark, the dark inside the dark,
The darks that bear wars, cruel mothers.

***

I arrive to you, complicated, my hands ignorant.
You open your eyes, wider than time,
Your hair caresses me, like a breath on the lips.
I don't have lips enough to feel it, to become vapor.

***

The song.
The voices weave one in the other,
Inside them things crisscross:
The solitudes, the ages of sadness, the silences,
The beginning of a word, the people, the endless people.
And the exquisite embroidery sings us.

***

The winds of war.
The southern winds bring the south close,
As if the desert was a bird of sand.
The western winds bring the sea close to our feet,
A shark of waves.
The winds have many seasons. Death has only once more.
The iron insect, like huge moths sowed rot. They killed even death.
There were not enough moth balls to protect us,
There are no moth balls for pain, for death, for time.

***

They said;
Whatever is to Caesars, is for the Caesars.
Whatever is to God, is for God.
I come, small, almost invisible. Patient, inevitable,
I come with so few words:
Whatever is to human, is for humans.
They put you in prison for much less than that,
But I am not silent. The person in my head is free.
He speaks. There are many voices in his voice,
As if the people used his voice.
As if they learned how to speak inside this voice.

***

The years are hard.
There is no color left on time, the big chameleon.
Some think it is a good omen,
They don't know that soon, very soon,
Time will drink color
From the torn hymen of innocence, the thieves of innocence,
From the torn toys of life, the thieves of suns.
Time will take its colors back,
And the thieves will have nowhere to go, except time.

***

The times are hard,
So, nothing is safe, not even asking.
Curiosity is dangerous.
You don't know the wide feet of a question, strong, stubborn.
They hang people for much less than that,
And yet, you ask.
They hang you, your feet kick the air,
Until they grow longer,
Until the question kicks their face.

***

When you look,
You should be, the whole of you,
In the circle of your eye, in the circle of seeing.
You should focus on what is written in the eye,
And you should spread your eyes in the corridors of time
Beneath you, inside you, around you.
Let your eyes do what they should: to see.
Remember, time can come from all direction, like life, like death.

***

Everything begins together:
Your feet climb the mountain,
And the mountain climbs in your feet.
You dream a dream, a beautiful dream,
A dream of people, for the people,
And the dream, somewhere deep,
Uses who you were, who you are. It dreams you.
Some dreams are power,
They change you, they make you more real.

***

I return.
You relieve the blue in my lips. The frozen time.
Your eyes: the big artists.
They draw over me small suns.
The blue thaws, like silent water.
No. you don't cry.

***

Maybe, one day,
The drown ones will lie in the sun, to dry their breath.
In the battle field, the pieces of the bodies:
Hands, eyes, will call each other by with the tongue of the body, the true Esperanto.
Maybe the black pain, like a wild forest fire,
Will be lighter than ash, will be a handful of ash, nothing more.

***