GOLGOTHA

I inhabit gravity

to hear my voice

I must rely on my spine

I must rely on the ropes inside my body

not yet, I say to the reed the wind bends

not yet, I say and tie another knot

light and dark around me are complete

pray for me in the barren landscape

where I howl and hope, unable to tell apart

sound and its echo

LANDSCAPE

I say his name

and a ridge forms

a village emerges from the mist

and returns to history.

He kisses the bride on his wedding day

and ends the civil war.

The sheep multiply like clouds

there is no open horizon, only the plains and the mountains

a little further down in the small town a cinema,

the port with the ships, the port with the airplanes.

Father, I say, the way I say Minotaur,

Minotaur, I say, the way I say nation

I say his name again

and the town burns.

Only a line of blood remains.

VIOLETS

But now a girl is going up the stairs

holding violets

the skies behind her are gates

for the light and the dark

as she walks bidding farewell to the dead.

If we could write down the history of the soul

everything would exist interminably

the faithful parishioners would nod to the girl

that now gallops through memory

her eye no different

from the eye of the horse,

the eye of God.

SONG

I sing, because the song is free

and hope is a bone I bury and unbury

I hold on to a low cloud

I hold on to a copper nail,

to the blind horse that leads the way

to a breast that turns into a forest

the way a song turns into a prayer

in the forest lies a golden glade

and in the glade, my face

I sing, because the song is free

and hope is a bone I bury and unbury.

From Probable Landscapes (Ενδεχόμενα Τοπία)

© 2021 by Danae Sioziou and Antipodes Editions

Translated from the Greek by Panagiota Stoltidou

Danae Sioziou is a multilingual poet, translator, and cultural worker. Her first poetry collection received the Hellenic Writers’ Association Jannis Varveris Literary Award and the State Prize for Young Writers. Her second book was shortlisted for the 2022 National Prize for Poetry; in 2024, she published her third collection, Epistles. Sioziou was a fellow of the Santa Maddalena Foundation and Villa Ruffieux. Her work has been translated into over thirteen languages, featured in international journals and anthologies and presented at major literary events internationally. She curates the Purple Medusas Literature Festival and works for the Book History Lab at the National and Kapodistrian University of Athens. Her translations include works by Susan Sontag and John Berger.

Panagiota Stoltidou is a writer and translator from Thessaloniki, Greece. She read Literary Studies and Sociolinguistics at Freie Universität Berlin and Columbia University in New York City and is currently pursuing a master’s in Comparative Literature in Berlin and Zurich. Her reviews, poetry and translations have appeared or are forthcoming at Hopscotch Translation, Quarto Magazine, The Columbia Review and elsewhere. She is the editor-in-chief of Filmpost.