SOLITUDE

I owe you everything.
Potter’s clay the precarious
structure of divine guilt
the shadow of whomever shaped
the pyramid
 with a sense
  of goodwill.

Before I could say “save me” I was born
of you.  Inside your soft belly
throbbed the odd substance
creating, o god of superfluity,
fear
 of the future existence
   I owed.

(Where there is
no wind
candlelight 
flickers
yearning for the hands’
startled youth.
I confessed suffering
from cardiac prostitution
so I know why you
still insist
on being
close to me.)

Veroniki Dalakoura
Translated from the Greek by Yannis Goumas