Statues

By Panagiota Zikou

Just as decay

 strikes the frozen marble,

 man,

 with untrained wings of struggle,

 meets the passage of his life.

 The years await us,

 the portraits of eternal life,

 where in our inertia we forgot we exist,

 here, on the ground we tread.

 The future awaits us,

 more than it awaits the living and the finite.

 You, O adorned humans,

 Princes of the moon, behold:

 this tainted taste of the barren body

 that stands and watches history,

 the envious cowardice of always,

 the cracked sensation of a lost battle,

a defeated scent that feeds the unbridled hemorrhage of your centuries,

surging like a true emblem of human suffering.

The plastered silence of the frozen edge

 recalls something of the aristocracy

 of the emerging scent

 of the earthen, mud-bound, buried ages.

 From the tears of muted steps,

 from cold snow and ice,

 he approaches the unexpected land.

 Perhaps that is why we never moved

 in the manner of dawn,

 beautiful strangers of the unknown.

 Where we might vanish with them,

we dead creatures.

Only those statues of time,

 those exiled fragrances,

 which remain to watch humbly

 the thorns of their wounds,

 shall accompany the history owed to us.

For when you are only mute,

and only history hears you, prince,

men wonder less why you exist,

and seek instead the shapes of light.

At this moment,

when something in our eyes recalls

 the melancholy of an old death,

 nothing brings us into the world —

 like you —

 but the memory of time.

By Panagiota Zikou