Comments & modern Greek artists, painters: I’m prehuman, a creature Indifferent to calm or tempest...

Greek poetry & Greek artists, Greek paintings, Greek painters


Yannis Stavrou, On Waves, oil on canvas

In this way escaping into distance
becomes a flight into time
Until the signs of an antique age
are all around me...

Nikos Fokas
The Ocean

I avoid the coastline like a shark.
When a bulge
of land appears
gaining depth and perspective
like an embryo gradually forming
The details steadily multiplying until
as in Creation
Man arrives at last, and human families
start moving about
endowed with cinematic quality,
Even before I discern an individual’s
eyes, nose or mouth,
Though I too an anthropomorphic
I take to the open sea.



From a secure distance
the mainland is just another cloud
Though looking back as I flee
I glimpse the phases of Creation
in retrograde, the closer
Lost inside the farther away
The more recent in the older
In this way escaping into distance
becomes a flight into time
Until the signs of an antique age
are all around me
as if God had not yet gone
beyond the horizon, a life
Still bearing the imprint
of apocalyptic scripture:



When waves are low, inclined
to final submission
like scraps of paper hovering
until held motionless by earth
Or when with uneven
momentary peaks corresponding
to uneven degree of horror
on a spiritual scale,
When the sea possesses the dimensions of heaven
Or fits wholly inside a flash of lightning,
I see fleeting fins
tails emerging from water
disappearing tentacles
Like limbs in museums, elliptical, unintelligible
parts of an invisible whole.



As if I were living in a time
before Man
Where the whale too participates
unsuspectingly in some general preparation
waiting for an arrival that
for its own sake shouldn’t happen – for truly,
Humans, your faces in the distance
empty yet of eyes, noses, mouths
as if half-finished or hidden
behind a murderer’s stocking-mask
I don’t want to see you close up:
I’m prehuman, a creature
Indifferent to calm or tempest –
Light in the Ocean, secure
As a floating plank.