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Fairy Tale

Poetry by Nicos Alexiou
The Silver Sphinx · English text

When I was a child on warm summer nights my kindly godmother had me read stories in languages of a foreign gaze about princesses and kings. And I always closed the books with ice-cold hands from all the deaths I’d touched, blood, dead bodies, and burnt cities. Likewise now after all the years you’ve been gone I tie a red yarn around silver rotors of dead people’s watches and wait for an untamable sunrise to dawn so another self can triumphantly rise, a self who will thrust bared swords to finally slay the dragon and with tremendous words and secret songs will expel the ghastly ghosts from the desolate home and my poisoned heart.

The Painter

Poetry by Nicos Alexiou
The Silver Sphinx · English text

Image One: Restless nighttime river and broken brushes. Image Two: The warm nights of loneliness, back to the walls, he descends into the hell of the currants and dreams of bright flowers on the open sea. In dark cells with humble hands underneath the mossy bonds of county sheriffs he touches the blood of bodiless martyrs – forgotten innocent in sunless frontier fields of slender poplars and songless nightingales. Image Three: And when once again, tender in his secret, he strokes the mournful tears of women with sorrowful cicadas hidden in their long hair as they slowly ascend in the hot midday sun, he tosses his white doves into the flaming olive grove and unlocks for a moment with the breeze heaven’s narrow door. Image Four: Colors naked explosions in the dark restless nighttime river and broken brushes

The Fall

Poetry by Nicos Alexiou
The Silver Sphinx · English text

He still stands at the fallen door sad with the broken knife. The circles of hell scarily shatter in his hands. With a boom they leveled shelters inside and out for everyone. Agitated, the dead of the house rush to the sunken rooms, crowding into the foundations in the bones you hear death’s murmur as the icy north wind slices through the cracks in the walls. In vain the gods of the hearth, some crippled, others blind, wrap in a kerchief the sacrificial rooster. Adamant legionnaires, tax collectors and moneychangers lay siege to what is left of the home. He still stands there sad with the broken knife. Within his heart the melted iron waves unyieldingly, like the young blossoming bough of Spring.