Dark Deed: Four Poems by Tasos Leivaditis

         
     Nevertheless, the news we were waiting for arrived, and it could have, perhaps, changed our lives if it weren’t in an unfamiliar language, one that was understood by some who had all died young, but the people were moved, because in the end this too was a form of fatherhood, and as usually happens in these cases the man searching through old discarded things, outside the city, turned and looked at me, and as distrustful as I may have been I could not fail to notice the treasure, for the nights in the month of November had grown altogether longer, and the hot potatoes we passed from hand to hand steamed in the darkness, like one who is praying. 
Grant, Lord, that we always be prepared, and along with your rain 
          sprinkle on the vineyards 
the merciful gift that we be forgetful, we never built a house and we lived 
          outside our sorrow 
so that they wouldn’t find us, we slept next to hedges 
blanketed only with our secret, and forsaken and naked 
          we always pass through quiet streets,
while at that moment someone who is dying is walking along, 
          in his cloak, with us. 
          How, indeed, will I be able to recount someday that I was always waiting, and I often panicked that I was responsible for everyone and that I myself had to see it, otherwise we’ve been brought into the world in vain, a glass would then crack or the staircase creak, and that was the sole response, our gaze, however, didn’t linger long on the dead woman because the secret lay elsewhere, in that night when she was a young girl still and had lost her ring, inexplicably, and we could see it now on her finger, just as inexplicably, or perhaps so that we might realise that it was always missing and the unspeakable had settled in the old room,
          it’s time, then, to pray: Lord, do not abandon us, especially as night falls and we walk almost guardedly behind our shadow, which becomes stranger by the day and starts to follow someone else. 
          The first night he was still poor, “Lord,” I said to him, naturally I had no other relatives and I had to look after him, “I’m the new lodger,” he said, not wanting to show that he knows, I then humbly lifted the stone and gently placed it down, lest the wind blow the lot away from us, “Mary is waiting for you,” I said to him, but she was standing sadly behind him, for she would never come to know God, since she was already carrying him within her, and when the three women appeared I showed them the tomb, from which he always found the way out, the rhododendrons had even begun giving off a scent, and at the bend of the road the servant girl was no longer crying over the broken pitcher.
          That was the first miracle.