Helen
Teucer: …in the sea surrounding Cyprus where Apollo ordered me to live the name Salamis is given to a city in memory of my home-island
Helen: I never went to Troy; my ghost did
Messenger: What are you saying? It was just for a ghost that we fought so much?
‘The nightingales don’t let you sleep in Platres.’
Shy nightingale, amid the leaves’ breathing
you who gift the forest’s musical freshness
to lonely bodies and to the souls
of those who know they won’t come back.
Blind voice, who searches in the darkness of memory
for footsteps and gestures; I wouldn’t dare say kisses;
and the bitter raving of the excited slave-woman.
‘The nightingales don’t let you sleep in Platres.’
What is Platres?
And this island, who knows it?
I lived my life hearing names for the first time
new countries, new foolishness of men
or gods my fate which pendulates
between the last sword of an Ajax
and another Salamis
brought me here to this seashore. The moon
rose from the pelagos like Aphrodite;
it covered the stars of the Archer, now it goes to find
Scorpio’s heart, and it changes everything.
Where is the truth?
I too was an archer in the war;
my destiny, that of a man who missed his target.
Poetic nightingale,
as a night like this by the seashore of Proteus
the Spartan slave-girls heard you and started lamenting
and among them—who could have believed it—Helen!
The same one we hunted for by the Scamander.
She was there, at the lips of the desert; I touched her, she talked to me
‘It isn’t truth, it isn’t truth’ she yelled.
‘I never boarded the light-blue bowed ship
I never set foot on valiant Troy.’
With her breasts pushed up, sun in her hair, and that stature
shadows and smiles all over
on the shoulders, the thighs, the knees her alive skin, and the eyes
with the large eyelids
she was there on the shore of a Delta. And in Troy?
Nothing in Troy—an idol.
The Gods wish it that way.
And Paris, slept with a ghost as though it was a real body
and for ten years we slaughtered each other for Helen.
Great pain had covered Hellas.
So many bodies thrown
into the jaws of the sea into the jaws of earth
so many souls
given to the millstones, like grain.
And the rivers swelled, blood in their soil
all this for a linen undulation for a ghost
for a butterfly’s flicker, a swan’s down
for an empty shirt, for a Helen.
And my brother? Nightingale, nightingale, nightingale,
what is a god? What is not a god? And what is there between them?
‘The nightingales don’t let you sleep in Platres.’
Teary bird, on the sea-kissed Cyprus that meant to remind me of my home-island,
I moored alone with this fairy tale,
if it is true that this is a fairy tale,
if it is true that people will never take up again
the old deceit of the gods; if it is true
that another Teucer, after many years
or another Ajax or Priam or Hecuba
or some unknown, nameless, who yet
saw a Scamander overflow with cadavers,
it’s not his destiny to hear
messengers coming to tell him
that so much pain, so much life
went into the abyss
all for an empty shirt, all for a Helen.
Libros Libertad 