Gift silver poem

I know that all this is worthless and that the language
I speak doesn't have an alphabet
Since the sun and the waves are a syllabic script
which can be deciphered only in the years of sorrow and exile

And the motherland a fresco with successive overlays

frankish or slavic which, should you try to restore,

you are immediately sent to prison and

held responsible

To a crowd of foreign Powers always through
the intervention of your own


As it happens for the disasters


But let's imagine that in an old days' threshing-floor
which might be in an apartment-complex children
are playing and whoever loses

Should, according to the rules, tell the others
and give them a truth
Then everyone ends up holding in his
hand a small
Gift, silver poem.

Odysséas Elytis,The tree of Light and the Forteenth Beauty, tradução de Marios Dikaiakos.