Untitled

It's raining with absolute sincerity.
Therefore the sky is not a rumour
it exists
and so much so that the soil is not
the only solution
as every indolent dead man claims.


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Personal notes: 

This poem was published as part of the collection 'We moved next door' (2007). 
Although brief, it bears complex ideas about mortality, spirituality, and human perceptions. 

The poem's first image involves a natural phenomenon, 'rain', which is often introduced by artists (literally or figuratively) to allude to pessimistic or dark views and gloomy circumstances. The poem's other images (a sky, the soil we use to bury the dead) may suggest that Dimoula is using 'rain' to refer to our negative perceptions about spirituality and our own mortality. 

However, Dimoula pairs this phenomenon with the abstract concept of 'sincerity'. What does it mean to rain 'with absolute sincerity'? Sincerity can have a negative and positive effect. It can hurt you, but it can also set you free. The poet perhaps suggests that this is the same with any feelings or perceptions provoked by 'rain'. 

The poet continues to verify the existence of a 'sky', a phenomenon that alludes to positive feelings about our mortality. For Christians, heaven is somewhere in the sky, a symbol of hope. It is interesting that what verifies such a positive concept ('sky') is the 'sincere' existence of a perceivably negative concept ('rain'). 

The poem's next image involves the soil, which here symbolises death or any other feelings and perceptions about the end of things. The poet calls these feelings and perceptions 'indolent'. They are indolent because they take the end for granted, and do not contemplate other 'solutions'. Dimoula has offered the 'sky' as a solution to this 'soil'. She is suggesting that what we may perceive to be a dead end, can be in fact an endless road. 

Burglars in thought

She explains sobbing
that burglars invaded her house
took her jewelry and raped
senile values.

Why is she not happy about it?

I haven't had a burglar
set foot in my house for years
not even for coffee.
I deliberately leave the pot unlocked.

When returning home every time I pray
to find the door's eyeteeth broken

the lights to tremble as if they banged
on the head of a tall earthquake

to find the hoards
from the mirror's mummy kingdoms stolen

as if someone had shaved in the bathroom
and a beard has grown on my hairless touch
their denial tied up laying on the floor 

and from the kitchen the slowly approaching steam of
a warm footstep with lots of cinnamon on top.

Solitaire

Life
was born in its past
it spends there most of its time
and only comes here
to fulfil the present

- we were being tactful when we named it life.
We would have named it brevity
but such a swift name
is an insult
to creation

its arrival is rousing
it travels with a bunch of optimistic
artistic views

that the dreamy future
is not far from the present

as a fresh phrase
from a dream's cry out

as your lips from the parting's
lips.

But the arrival's journey is long
when are we reaching the parting's lips?
life asks every now and then
anxious
will the unknown wait for it
at the station?

otherwise
it doesn't know where to go on its own.

And there, on the way
to this long anxiety
life
first learns to dream.


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Personal notes: 

This poem was published as part of the collection 'The finder's fee' (2010). 
Its themes involve life, its brevity, and hope. 

The first stanza may suggest an obsession or preoccupation with the past as being a detriment to life in the present. It may also suggest the importance of the past in shaping the present. The last line in this stanza suggests that what we call 'life' or 'living' happens in very brief instances - life in the present is brief. In contrast, as suggested by the third line, living in the past (literally and figuratively) is a much longer affair. 

The second stanza directly addresses life's brevity. The poet is in a playful mood, a bit sarcastic but at the same time, surprisingly, respectful (I realise these may sound contradictory). 

Dimoula acknowledges, with a hint of sarcasm, that life is brief, but also recognises that life is part of a bigger concept which demands respect, what she calls 'creation'.

In the rest of the poem she addresses the necessity of hope in our lives. We live in hope that the future will fulfil our dreams, knowing that what actually will happen is unknown. Her argument is not profound, but is universal and true. Despite, or because of this unknown and the inevitable 'parting' with life and the people we care about, humans dream and hope.

In sorrow you enlarged me

Should I call you by your first name as well
the same way faith calls you its Lord?

You found clay for free half price for the dead end
and you created created humans non-stop.
And now how will the encounter accomodate us all.
For us to enter others need to exit
the small possibilities, in out
become all the rage.

Granted you have given us a vast loneliness
open space, let us meet there.

It works. There is some traffic
but is mostly visited
by some hungry ghosts
who bury their faces in food
deboning our fattened anticipation
cumbered nullified
in the way every satiety nullifies.
The need seizes the best ones
locks itself for hours inside with them hooh ha
it bullies them gives them pocket money
fulfills them shatters them
unbeknown though, no mouthful left.

The other noises you hear are not a turnout
but just noise itself prancing around that everyone has left
you are hearing the walking stick holding tense,
crawling as far to pretense, or
the memory stumbling on similarities
gets startled shouts thieves thieves  - what fool
covets to rob an empty hoard.

You created the complicated encounter very narrow.
For some to enter we must exit ourselves.
But even those who have broken in, stepping
overstepping over our persecution, how much
of an encounter do you think they are left to feel.
By the time they cross the intricate attraction,
and for their sight to adjust
to the low foreign light of approach
and sit down, there holding gently the hand
of completeness
the unfulfilled invades with its gang and
men get out the seats are taken.

Take caution

When you are setting up the table

before you sit down

check thoroughly

your opposite chair 

if it is strong perhaps it creaks

perhaps the notches became loose

perhaps the joints have worn out

if a worm

undermines the frame

because the person who doesn't sit there

gets heavier by the day.

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Personal notes: 

This poem was published as part of the collection 'We moved next door' (2007). 
Its themes, like in many of Kiki Dimoula's poems, involve memory, personal loss/absence and the experience of being alone. This experience can be painful, but endurable.  

The poet may be addressing herself, or giving advice to her audience. 

The vacant chair opposite to the poet is a metaphor for the memory or mental presence of an intimate other. Perhaps this person used to sit there with her/us (an actual loss), or perhaps this person was never there (a desired/imagined loss). Either way, the poet/us are alone at the table. 
Every day the preservation of this memory/mental presence (a ritual) becomes harder, though the reasons for this are not clear. Is it because with age the poet's/our mental abilities are becoming weaker (and therefore the memory becomes heavier to hold), or is it because she is/we are increasingly hurting by this person's absence? The poet may be warning us that the person's absence will become more and more painful, or maybe she is being sarcastic about her own fixation with this ritual. 

There is a hint of optimism as well. Is the ritual an act of holding on to a painful loss/desire, or is it a way to strengthen the resistance to this pain and make it endurable? 

In Greek, Dimoula refers to the person as a 'he' (most probably referring to her deceased husband).  However, I did not specify the gender of the person in this translation because the poem can easily take a more universal context. 

Building

Truly how well did it go
that big business for feelings
you launched.

I hear it knelt you down.
At least are you clear of all the liabilities?
Have you helped oblivion to build?
It had been wanting for years
its own family
its own home
away
away from the memory
of those who loved them both.

Un-expectations

My Lord what doesn't await us still.

I am sitting here and sitting.
It's raining without raining
as when a shadow
returns a body to us.

I am sitting here and sitting.
Myself here, my heart opposite
and further away
my weary relationship with it.
So we seem many
each time emptiness counts our heads.

The empty room is blowing.
I hold tight onto the way I have
of being swept away.

I have no news of you.
Your photograph stationary.
You stare as if approaching
you smile like no.
Dried flowers at the side
repeat to you ceaselessly
their un-holdable name semprevives
semprevives - everlasting, everlasting
so you don't forget what you are not.

Time asks me
exactly where by I want it to pass
exactly how I spell my name
shiver or shrivel.
Such amusements.
No end knows any spelling.

I have no news of you.
Your photograph stationary.
As if it's raining without raining.

As shadow returns to me the body.
And as we will meet again one day
up there.
At some overgrown sparseness
with shady un-expectations
and evergreen un-collisions.
The interpretation of the ferocious
silence that we will experience
- an advanced form of the intense
intoxication that an encounter causes
down here - will be performed by a void.
And we will be overtaken then
by a passionate un-recognition
- an advanced form of the embrace
that the encounter employs down here.
Yes we will meet. Un-breathily, secretively
from the attraction. In a downpour
of a heavy lack of gravity. At some
excursion perhaps of the infinite to ad infinitum;
at the ceremony for awarding losses to the known,
for its great contribution to the un-known;
invited to a destination's starlight,
to cessations' frolics for dissolving
causes and of farewell skies'
former great meanings.
Except that this companionship of distances
will be a bit sulky, un-cheerful
even if nothingness finds cheer from nothing.
Perhaps because the soul of the company will be absent.
                                                                         The flesh.
I shout to the ash 
to disarm me.
I call upon the ash 
by its code name: Everything. 

Ι assume you meet up often
yourself and the death of that dream.
My last-born dream.

Of all I had the most prudent.
Un-turbid,  gentle, understanding.
And sure not very dreamy,
though neither cheaply subdued,
not every street's white sheets.
A very thrifty dream,
in intensity and errors.
Of the dreams I raised
the one most sympathetic to me: not to
grow older alone.

I assume you meet up often
yourself and its death.
Give it my regards, tell it to come
along when we meet
there, at the losses' awards ceremony.

Love me as long as you don't live.
Yes yes the impossible is enough for me.
I was loved by it another time as well.
Love me as long as you don't live.
Because I have no news from you.
And heaven forbid that the absurd should show
no signs of life.


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Personal notes: 

This poem was published as part of the collection 'Farewell never' (1988). 
The poem is longer than most of Kiki Dimoula's poems. It is the first poem in the collection published after her husband's loss. It is hard not to read this poem as a direct reference to this loss and the anguish of outliving a life partner. However, the poem alludes to broader themes about relations between individuals, human mortality, and the perceived afterlife.  

The poem includes repetitions of words and sentences (a technique found also in a few other poems by Dimoula), perhaps to emphasise the recurrence and persistence of the feelings associated with the state she found herself in - having to live the rest of her life alone, without her partner. These repetitions make her sound trapped and tired.

She maintains an existential mood, throughout the poem. She expresses anger, bitterness, mockery, and even weariness about her partner's mortality (and perhaps her own mortality as well). She ridicules any suggestion that there is an after life. For the poet, such a premise is absurd and empty of any significance or meaning. 

The poem's title originates from a word that is used mostly as an adjective (the 'unexpected'). However, the poet uses it here as a noun (in plural tense). She draws attention to this strange word by choosing to 'elevate' it to a more 'solid' part of speech and by doing so, allowing it to have a plural tense. This provokes some initial questions: What was she expecting(or looking forward to) and why is she not expecting it anymore?

The poem provides possible answers to these questions. She was expecting not to grow old alone, but now she will have to. She is not expecting to meet her partner again, in any form of afterlife. 

Dimoula introduces the poem by inverting a popular Greek saying: 'My Lord, what awaits us still'. In its popular use, this saying is used to express grief rather than joy (for anticipating bad things rather than good things in one's life, especially after something unpleasant has happened). The saying suggests also that things to come (in one's life) are at the Lord's mercy. Dimoula uses this saying to emphasise the poem's focal point: the loss of a beloved person. She writes: 'My Lord, what doesn't await us still', suggesting that she is experiencing a state where there are not a lot of things to expect/look forward to, not even in the afterlife. It's interesting that despite the use of a contraction the saying still reads as a lament - perhaps drawing attention to the inevitability of the poet's situation and the desperation inherited in it. 

Dimoula uses a similar technique in the last verse. She adds a contraction to a common declaration of love and devotion (from 'Love me as long as you live' to 'Love me as long as you don't live'). The absurdity of this statement accentuates the poet's feelings and desperation. She is now left with the absurd, and she is willing to accept it as her new reality, in the same way, she accepted her old reality - being loved. By this, she suggests that the existence of love, and possibly human relationships or even life in general, might be as absurd as its/their loss.