Comments & Greek painting, Greek artists: Athens sprawls like a hetaira offering herself to April...

Greek poetry & Greek artists, Greek painters


Yannis Stavrou, Acropolis, Athens II, oil on canvas

A sweet hour. Athens sprawls like a hetaira
offering herself to April...

Kostas Karyotakis
Nypenthe - The Shadow of the Hours

Athens

A sweet hour. Athens sprawls like a hetaira
offering herself to April.
Sensuous scents are in the air,
the spirit waits for nothing any more. The silver of the evening's eyelids
droops, grows heavy up above the houses.
Queenlike the Acropolis puts on
the sunset's crimson like a robe. The first star rises with a kiss of light.
A zephyr by Ilissus falls in love with
quivering laurels, rosy nymphs. A sweet hour of delight and love, when
small birds chasing one another raise a wind
that beats upon a column of Olympian Zeus...


Kostas Karyotakis (1896-1928)

Tonight the Moon...

Tonight the moon will fall upon
the strand, a heavy pearl.
And over me will play the mad
mad moonlight. The ruby wave will shatter
at my feet, and scatter all the stars.
From my palms two doves
will have been born; they'll rise -- two silver birds --,
be filled -- two cups -- with moonlight,
sprinkle moonlight on my shoulders,
on my hair. The sea is molten gold.
I'll launch my dream to sail
upon a ca&idieresis;que. I'll tread a diamond
into gravel, glistening. The encircling light will seem to pierce
my heart, a heavy pearl.
And I shall laugh. And then I'll weep... And there,
there's the moonlight!

A Tree

With calm, indifferent brow
I'll greet the afternoons, the dawns.

A tree, I'll stand and gaze at both
the tempest and the azure sky.

I'll say that life's the coffin
in which people's joy and sorrow die.

-----------------------

translated by Peter J. King and Andrea Christofidou