Gift Silver Poem

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I know that all this is worthless  and that the language
I speak doesn't have an alphabet

Since the sun and the waves are a syllabic script
which can be deciphered only in the years of sorrow and exile

And the motherland  a fresco with successive overlays
frankish or slavic which, should you try to restore,
you are immediately sent to prison and
held responsible

To a crowd of foreign Powers  always through
the intervention of your own

As it happens for the disasters

But  let's imagine that in an old days' threshing-floor
which might be in an apartment-complex children
are playing and  whoever loses

Should, according to the rules, tell the others
and give them a truth

Then everyone ends up  holding in his
hand a small

Gift, silver poem.

© Odysseas Elytis