Amazon

I have re-assembled this poem by Yannis Kondos translated from the Greek into English. Gritty images.

It was noon following the battle.

All of us were dead tired, and began taking off our helmets and breastplates.

In front, the enemy had retreated behind the hill.

Overhead, the sun burned the iron, our skin, and our loneliness.

The wounded were groaning, the horses breathing their last.

Ambulances sped this way and that, a red cross on their bonnets.

I was thirsty.

I took the flask but there was sand in it.

I pick some blades of grass to cool my lips.

I undo my boots.

(The tenses, history, and our lives were all mixed up).

Without caring, I go behind a rock to urinate.

As I watch the curve of yellow liquid,

suddenly in front of me was the Amazon -

dark-skinned, with one breast exposed,

the other cut off leaving skin pink as the dawn.

With golden greaves on her long legs,

she smelt of death.

She called out in Greek: “Stay right where you are!”

I froze and tried to do up my fly.

For a moment I took her to be an angel,

standing there – tall, with the sun behind her,

but soon learnt the sad truth.

She raised her sword, and with a yell

brought it down on me –

cleaving my body in two,

then slung me on her back

like a slaughtered lamb.

Since then, I’ve been living with her –

making things out of wood and string.

My mother keeps running to the Red Cross and prisioner-of-war camps

with a yellowing photograph.