Live Encounters Greek Poets & Writers September 2026
The Piper, poems by Dimitra Christodoulou.
Translated from Greek by Aristi Trendel.
The Piper
My heart weeps like a devil’s baby
Beaten by its former kindness.
Since no hope remains to it
It seeks applause for the role it plays.
As if in revolt against its god
With the eloquence of a giant firecracker.
The stars drain themselves inside their own mouths.
They hurl foul words at one another,
They buzz in the celestial tumult,
They thrust their baubles into the earth
And my heart weeps, robbed and empty
Like a bitch whose puppies have been taken.
My heart weeps with its timid beating
Which the night wraps in a sheet.
The little moon pops like a balloon
And I am missing from the clothes I wear.
With that crash from the four directions
The first great cold is here.
My heart weeps like the smile of a cripple.
Its nobility overcomes deprivation.
A resurrection from the dominion of death
Though angels turn their backs on it.
Forever outside the eternal palaces
The wise swallows keep beating their wings.
(Unpublished)
The Looking-Glass
Those two pitch-black stars in my mirror
Will blaze when it breaks.
Then the salt of my tears
Will season my weary blood.
My whole life, food, flesh and bone
Of a reflection, of a daily tending,
For my image of mercury and steel
Drawn with a blade on water.
Buried, the dead man of my hunger lived
and immortal, his starving murderer.
But the blue, the rose-colored,
The winged flowers of my verses
Only as much as a cloud can humble itself
Touched the earth.
Why seek consolation
For the stitched mouth of my heart…
There—it has come; I recognize it now,
That Which I Cannot Recognize.
That alien death I bought
By wrapping the sky in silk
In the silence of my all my years.
Nursing bouquets of butterflies,
Untouched by the warm breath of the world,
Yet eaten to the marrow by it.
(Unpublished)
© Dimitra Christodoulou
Dimitra H. Christodoulou, (Athens, 1953), studied Law and Philology. She is the author of seventeen poetry collections, a volume of prose, an anthology of translated Ancient Greek lyric poetry, and a volume of translations from Ancient Greek drama. She has received the Greek State Prize for Poetry (2008), the Anagnostis Poetry Prize (2015), the Jean Moréas Poetry Prize (2018), and the Makis Lachanas Prize of the Panthessalian Poetry Festival (2024). Her poetry has been translated into several languages.