ELSA KORNETI

ELSA KORNETI

BEARING HUMANITY’S PAIN

I

I stand amazed

And look at me

Turned into what I always dreamed of

Slow and steady of step

Faithful servant of law and order

Dogged follower of the straight and narrow

I freeze into my assigned position

Rusty of joint

I struggle to pick myself up when I fall

A key bores obstinately into my back

Never one to complain

I endure all without a word

Steely of sensibility

Dead of tongue

I throw myself on the mercy

Of those who scourge me, those who break me

Those who beat me, those who reject me

Just this, let it suffice me

To be remembered now and forever

For that which I always dreamed of

For that which I have become

A little Wind-up Man

II

I am

A fortunate man

I live off the profitable management of impulses

And a successful practice

Of emotional thuggery.

You are

A happy man

When you dance, you vanish into thin air

And then your dream

Chases its own shadow

He is

A regular man

God gave him

A computer for a head

An office for a body

A safe box of a heart

III

If a person means something to you

You do not allow him to leave

You plant him in a flowerpot

You water him

You put him in the light

You name him

An Indoor Man

At times a fly

Will spit on him

At times a house pet will nibble on him

At times a child will pluck him

At times indifference will wither him.

DOLL HOUSE

When you were just a young ‘un

you played hide and seek with dolls for fun

and that’s how one fine day

you ran off and hid away

somewhere where you left no trail

Then, locked in a Lilliputian jail

you found yourself by accident

By accident the cat swallowed the key

By accident no-one noticed your truancy

And by accident one day you grew

Your arms hung out of the windows

Your legs out of the door

Your head poked out of the chimney flue.

And your doll house prison break

by mistake was believed to be

a  mutiny.

PRODUCT OF NEW TECHNOLOGY

She has learnt the lesson :

All breaks must be dealt with quickly

Detached bits glued to whatever is within reach

Hand to foot

Finger to eye

Nose to belly

Ear to heel

So that everything may be pieced back together --

crookedly

the wrong way round

grotesquely even --

In time before her sundered parts

Are sucked in by the latest state of the art

Electric Vacuum.

TRANSLATED BY PATRICIA FELISA BARBEITO

ELSA KORNETI

ELSA KORNETI: Active in organizing readings and events with other poets, Elsa Korneti was born in Munich, Germany, but grew up in Thessaloniki, Greece and still lives there. Appropriately, given the long history of cosmopolitanism in Greece’s second city, there is a clear glocalism at work in her poetry’s interlacing of English and other languages with Greek. Her career has been similarly diverse: studies in finance were followed by work as a journalist; she has published essays, book reviews, translations, short stories, and 8 books of poetry. She have won several awards and two poetry collections of her, A Bouquet of Fishbones and The Tin Pearl, were nominated for the Greek National Poetry Award. Part of her work has been translated and published in foreign anthologies and literary magazines in ten languages.