While They Speak

Titos Patrikios

While they speak in cafés
of love and freedom and that kind of thing,
how could you say love was abandoned,
how it eluded even solitude,
or how justice is shaped by the chaos
of a thousand insults and errors;
how could you say that freedom
could only be attained in the bottom of crowded cells 
where all the hours of our lives are held captive…

                    from Litigations (1981)
        


    translated by Christopher Bakken and Roula Konsolaki