Please check out http://verdadmagazine.org/vol6/poetry/williams.html, Spring 2009 Volume 6 of Verdad, which has two poems of mine, one written in Athens (see below) and one in Austria (written while reading Ted Hughes in the Alps)...
As a taste, "Hostel Room on Sofokleous Street":
Again I awake to the choppy syllables of motorbikes
dissecting the night. Greeks and Turks and boys
with much to prove battle the dogs
for dominion of silence. Without a clock
I only know refuse and shadow conjoin
and insomnia s leprous limbs stretch and groan
to introduce day.
Heated like the space between closed doors,
weighted like a cemetery,
this city no longer ancient emits a phosphorescent sigh, a neon outline.
History cannot loosen its grip
and the shutters of my barren room
keep out only what I desire.
The first chunk of night
that brought me back to this world
questioned "what city has awoken me?"
But the panting, hounding predawn people
strangling the streets
and the forever wandering
black bearded cassocks
and the meat marketers
displaying their morning fleshes
and the halves of statues time has left us
only answered in homeless pigeon coos.
Feigning to recognize my beloved sea amongst the shouts
of pastries and black coffee, ouzo and rotten fruit,
abandoned alleyways and bored, cyclic buses,
the almost-sun's perennial voices,
I also feigned wisdom,
shaded the broken moment
with a canopy of home.
All things foreign adopted a darkness.
The loose configuration of fears and desires
inaccurately named dreams
sung to my open eyes.
I approached the exposed bulb
to confirm my inner walls of brick
but within such light switch movement
awaits a cockroach and a lie.
So I sat in this certain darkness
just outside dream
and waited alongside it
the skittering feet of daybreak
and the monument of people
that would bring its own sea,
its own vast, unforgettable silence.
No comments:
Post a Comment