Poetics

- You're betraying Poetry again, you'll tell me,
Man's most sacred expression
You're using it again as a means, a pack-mule
For your sinister objectives
In full knowledge of the damage you're doing
To the young through your example.

- Tell me what you have not betrayed
You and your kind, for years and years,
Bartering your possessions one by one
In international markets and common bazaars
So you're left without eyes to see, without ears
To hear, with lips sealed and you say nothing.
For which of man's sacred rights are you arraigning us?

I know: preaching and rhetoric again, you'll say.
Well, yes! Preaching and rhetoric.

Words have to be hammered like nails.
If they're not to be lost in the wind.

poem by Manolis Anagnostakis from The Target (1970), translated by David Conolly
Added by Dan Costinaş
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