Monday, July 10, 2017

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.





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