Poetry

My father says yes
My mother says yes
I observe in the centre

My father says yes
My mother says no
I am whiplashed in the centre

My father is silent
My mother is talking
I walk away from the centre

My father is silent
My mother is silent
I walk my path in silence

from 'Between Zero and a Star'
© Aliki Roussin

Amazing Grace
I find you
Among forgotten skulls
Next to a solitary churchyard
Where as a merry child chasing butterflies
I tread upon a weeping soil
Secretly witnessing the loss
Left by the massacre
Of civil war

Amazing Grace
I find you
On a black marble cross
Where among
The names of heroes lost at war
I recognise my own
Carrying it for years
Around my neck without a moan
As heavy as a tombstone

Amazing Grace
I find you
When lost in a river
Of doors shut by betrayal
My grandmother’s snowflake song
Springs from her wedding crown
And raises me anew
Guiding me through

Amazing Grace
I find you
Ridding through my children’s innocence
Heralding their arrival
Into the dusty flaking world
Crowded with boxed robotic aspirations
Networked with God’s
Modern creation

Amazing Grace
I find you
In a woman’s hands
Holding my head
As I seek refuge
Next to a nuclear power station
Carrying in a bowl the world’s innocence
Like an aborted foetus
Of the globe

Amazing Grace
I find you
On the veined leaves of a plant
Kept in a greenhouse for protection
On grey concrete skyscrapers
Housing blank days
And violent nights
Next to Madonna’s
Vandalised flat

Amazing Grace
We’ve all been on the famous cross
Why then the fuss for just one man?
Jesus you’ve never been the only one
Your PR was simply better done
Through aeons we prayed enough
Now it’s your turn to pray for us
Your innocent beloved lambs
Lost in
An advertised
Utopian
Promised land

from 'Between Zero and a Star'
© Aliki Roussin

When you will sail again on the Aegean
Don’t look for Alexander’s desperate Gorgon
Neither the mythical siren’s love laced call
Just close your eyes and you may hear
Baris violin
A freeborn ocean song
Slashing the silver blue
Unshackled and immortal
Forever true

© Aliki Roussin

We have entered the Anthropocene epoch
No time to think about Democracy
Globalisation Capitalism Wars or Multinationals
People are ready to bunker down
Into the neighbourhoods cul-de-sac
Avoiding infection
Spread by the invisible silent visitor
The son of Imbalance and Greed
Thriving in an anthropogenic climate

Petroleum nightmares
Like giant dinosaurs
Bring unforeseen calamities
Seas drowned in plastic
Lands saturated with pesticides
Skies yellow with pollution
Ozone layers depleted
Corroding even the iron of words

Fears of confinement and illness
Tucked under blankets of feverish bones
Rooms turned into cells of uncertainty
Men walking away from women
Women walking away from children
Children walking away from the elderly
People wearing masks
Shuffling into empty spaces
As a whole new generation watches “survivor”
While struggling to survive

A coronavirus reigning
In the schism between egalitarianism and inequality
Where power becomes elusive
An unfulfillable ideal
In a fluid world where nothing is solid
A hallucination of command and control
Lurking in the speaking silence of a dream
Where every step is birth
Every step is death

Nation states left powerless
In the face of the invisible intruder
Who like dark matter
Undetectable and mysterious
Neither absorbing nor emitting light
Rests everywhere without malice

The exhausted nurse
Silent empty broken
Turns off the ventilator
And goes out into the void of the city
Where amidst the divided clouds
Thoughts
About the thousand dead lying inside
Surface
Shutting the world
Like the lid of a white coffin

Such grief is born not felt
And surely breaks a heart

As a contemporary Sisyphus climbing
Into the daily morning light
Where the vacuum
Between today and tomorrow lies
We will rise again
To build
From the bleakness of yesterday
And the remnants of today
New bright dreams
Hopes and calamities
In the clear skies of tomorrow

© Aliki Roussin

A child I was
Drawn to you
My father
Similar to an insect circling a lamp
Before resting
On a heavenly stone wall

I grew up
And the world
Like a genie’s twisted body
Emerging from an opaque phial
Beckoned to me

I travelled light
In the afterglow of a springtime sunset
Discovering new landscapes with the naked eye
While the camera lens you gave me
Captured people’s gaze
Out of a desolate transparency
Bouncing back on my iris

Soaked in Claret wine
Carrying a loaf of bread
I returned to you
Stepping out of a still life picture
Like an air breathing violin spider
Weaving a walkway on cracked crevices

You were waiting as always
By the old pine door
Your face partly illuminated
By the flickering candle light
Holding in your palms as an offering
A glass filled with the music of silence

© Aliki Roussin

You travel
Behind the light
Of music
Turning me into
An eternal waltz
While rain falls
In the dead
Fast food places

Our love grows old
Like a worn out coat
And our words are locked
In the barrel of an
Unused gun

Rest your sorrow
In my autumnal garden
Under the old pine tree
It is I who tried to turn you
From a sparrow
To a hawk
It was never you

© Aliki Roussin

I love you
You love her
He loves me
She loves him
We love them
You love him
He loves you
She loves me
They love us

© Aliki Roussin

A white rose
in front
of a loved person’s
photograph
blooming
memory

© Aliki Roussin

I carried your handbag today
And found in the pocket
Some sweets and a ticket for the Bolshoi Ballet
You loved dancing
Wanted to be a ballerina
But never did

Defying the heaviness of the falling nights
You danced life away the way you chose
Challenging the inevitable pain
And malfunctions of love
By redefining yourself
Into a different whole
Like an unfinished poem
With an ever changing title

Lying by the sea together
We stretched our boundaries
Creating new images of the world
Denying consciously our nothingness
Practicing freedom
Practicing death
On a minute molecule
Stolen from our life’s invisible canvas

I am wearing today
Your blue star sapphire ring
The one my father brought you
From the Far East
It glows and fades mysteriously like you
Sealed on your finger
Clasped on my finger
Like a utopian plain
Holding precious iced water

Your last supper was
A chocolate
Followed by a cigarette
The last punctuation of life
Smoked with untold elegance

I thought you had gone
You said
But I was there and brought you water
Then you murmured that you wanted to sleep
And you did
Forever

Empty space
But somewhere in between the blue corridors
Of sea and sky
Your gaze remains locked upon me
Like a priceless indelible birthmark

© Aliki Roussin

St. Francis’ church
Spears up its dome
Piercing silent prayers
Fixed on resilient columns
In a fluid world

In the centre
God overlooks the valley of Life
Where we rest awhile
Like fleeting caravan travellers
Made from rocks of unrest
Earthed at a journey’s edge

Scattered like moving dots
We are mutating offerings
To a cosmic perfection
Of an expanding
Infinite universe

© Aliki Roussin

In the four corners of the day
Sipping ouzo next to you
I become etherised thinking
But not daring touching you

Instead I wave my hand
Into nothingness
Chasing your hundred indecisions
Squeezing into a piece of
Fried cheese you offer me
A hundred and one visions

© Aliki Roussin

Rocks like abstract forms
Swimming through sea stories
And wind songs
Break the salty water
Of memories and tears

Cracks of knowledge
On their granite surface
Wait to be filled
With lost expectations

Caressing their hardened veins
Measuring their detail in isolation
I collect the ocean’s thoughts
From dried seaweeds

from 'Between Zero and a Star'
© Aliki Roussin

How can one hear
The song of the waves
Through an empty
Seashell?

© Aliki Roussin

I will never see you again
The only consolation now
Is gazing at the enigmatic skies
Where newly born gods
Afraid of tears
Refuse to fall

You left us
Like a hot star
Going through a violent transitional phase
Ejecting the mass that was binding you to earth

Your breathing and rhythmical heartbeat
During your last hours
Resembled my children’s
While still in the womb
Like you they laboured
Emerging from molecular clouds
Unleashing supersonic waves
Transforming their place of birth
And turning into earthly stars

Where is your energy flowing now?
Is it circling like an abstract form in the silent language of our dreams?
Is it hidden in a galactic centre behind obscuring dust?
Is it like a filamentary material left from a supernova blast?
Is it recycling into building a new generation of stars?
Or is it a runaway pinwheel firework
Ignited against a background of thousand galaxies
Swirling among the fury of star birth and star death
Returning dust to birth again?

Star bright
Star light
I thought I saw a new star being born tonight

© Aliki Roussin

He took off his gloves to greet her
Then gave her his gloves to warm her hands
He gazed at her wearing the eyes of a child
And when her hands had warmed up
He put on his gloves and he killed her
Leaving no trace

© Aliki Roussin

The old man
Drags his feet
Four steps and two
Then rests and breathes
Shuffling
Unsteadily
Into the large white armchair
Where for years his manly body
Sought respite from the daily toil
Weary bones now fill the space
Like light airfreight baggage

He leaves the walking stick
Hooked by his side
And with a sigh
Plunges in the white armchair
Shutting his eyes
Asking with a weary voice:
Where are my glasses?
Bring them to me
I need to find the keys
To unlock life and fly away

© Aliki Roussin

I love being alone
She whispers
But this love
Has turned solitude into torture
Like emptiness walking
Inside living spaces

So she burns down the house
No windows
No doors
No exit or entry
Now she can see the moon
Now she can see but him

Then she realised this was like a dream and opened her eyes
Even though her eyes were open
Open upon open until there was but pain of absence

Cladded in solitude
She writes him endless notes
The future lies hidden in shadows
Our meeting was a momentary marriage
Brief without feuds and no betrayals

Things are done on my terms he says
I have no ties
A new encounter every time
Like flat coloured dots
On the accessible map of the world

Break away from the habit of mooring
Break away from the habit of constant change
Let me be your BabaYaga
And ride my bright dawn through your life

Don’t like being cornered in
Really?
I know what will you say next
When will she get some sense?
Consider then this base commonsense
It will all blow over
It will all come right in the end
When it all comes right in the end
There is no point in living
It will just be too late

Then she realised that this was like a dream and opened her eyes
Even though her eyes were open
Open upon open until there were no more words to say

I create structures he maintains
And cannot change my way of being
Then build me in one so I can change
Into a bridge a house a temple
But promise me to visit
At dawn at midday and at dusk

He takes her in an igloo garden
And for every brick he lays
A kiss he gives her too
When the last brick closes her in
She whispers:
I do not mind being buried in
But I will miss your kisses
And so she floods the igloo
With all the women’s tears
Gathered for thousand years

Then she realised that this was like a dream and opened her eyes
Even though her eyes were open
Open upon open until there was nothing else to build

Her voice gentle as white goodnight
Seeps through the igloo walls
Please take me out
I am not the end
I am just love
Before any beginning
Please take me out
I am your life
And not a fantasy
Or dream

With his bare hands
He pulls the bricks out one by one
Seeing her smiling face
He takes her hand
And leads her to the sea
Dissolving in a sweet embrace

The water is not warm or cold
Just right to wash away the mortar
Keeping her hair wrapped up and dry
Like an unchartered map
She slides on him like soap leaving no traces
And stroking his exquisite rage
Passionately asks
Meet me in an hour at the limits of your city

Then she realised that this was like a dream and opened her eyes
Even though her eyes were open
Open upon open until there was nothing else to fill

He never came
Kept by an ugly woman jailer
Who did the rites so masterly
And chained him by her side
While she
Like walking death
Entered dazed in a café
Thinking about suicide
Reflecting sadly how
It might be a selfish act
And how her children bound her life

Damnable life
When even dying can’t solve a thing
Damnable life swallowing sorrows
Like bits of shed snake skin

Then suddenly
He appeared
A musician
Joining her in the coffee place
Noticing her suicidal thoughts
Floating in a glass of orange juice
With sad eyes and smiling face
A tune he played on his
Soprano sax

All pass away including life
And this cannot be helped
But if we are alive why die before our time?

For life is a rebellion against death
She cried
Art a rebellion against life
When life and death become too much alike
Alike nice word he said
And went on with a strange forgotten song
About a kiss tasting of orange

Yet all she saw was but his hands
Fingering the body
Of the saxophone
And all she saw was but his mouth
Mingling with breath pressing his lips
Onto the round holes of a mystery

Then she realised that this was like a dream and opened her eyes
Even though her eyes were open
Open upon open until there was nothing else to hear

Wrapped up inside the melody
She left her life behind
And with a coloured map
She travelled much and far
Until she wrote a song
About a king she met on a deserted road
Who wanted to now why
The love notes in her song
Required great skill to master

Then the king said
Look at my scars
They cut me in two
By pass my heart
And curve around my back
I cannot stay with you
You need much more than that

Interesting how you fuss about your scars
Mine is curved stretching
Between my nipple and my belly
Don’t talk to me about your scars
Nothing in life is a straight line
And silencing the digital alarm
They slept curled upon their scars
Lost in a galaxy of stars

Then she realised that this was like a dream and opened her eyes
Even though her eyes were open
Open upon open until there was nothing else to touch

Who is the wise man
Who said
That light was good and darkness evil?
In extremes all is reversed
So in the evening she laid upon him
Like a long broken glittering necklace
Fallen from his throat
And he became a living syllable as she entered his body
And she loved him lengthwise in the evening
And in the morning she wrote his name
With a jasmine bloom and honey
And she loved him vertically in the morning
And in the afternoons she slept by his side
And dreamed it was dawn
And dreamed it was night

Then she realised that this was life and shut her eyes
Even though her eyes were open
Shut upon shut until there was nothing else but life’s pure dream

© Aliki Roussin

Writing
A coded language
With fragmented feelings
In a moth-eaten city

In Holland
Van Gogh’s self-portrait
Is sinking among
Floating tulips

Melting permafrost
In Chinese cities
Kills
Unknown poets

Astronauts wearing
Enigmatic masks
Paint
Lunar landscapes

The Sahara desert leapfrogs
The Mediterranean into Spain
Bedouins exchange
Their camels for bulls

Freud got smothered
In dreamland’s divan
While searching
For a key

Your love like a letter
Of credit to a seller
Activates a performance bond
The deal is closed

The poet wanders
In a supermarket
Looking for
Frozen inspiration

Pouring rain
The night walks
Barefoot
In the mud

from 'Between Zero and a Star'
© Aliki Roussin