THE PRINCE OF LILIES

He stood to have a breather on the evening threshold.

His breath calm like the sky.

-- Remember, he had said, a house

is not just smoke and stone, nor

even dawn and dusk with invisible diagrams,

it is something else, like when we count

how many wells are hidden in the sea.

He remembered the Prince of lilies who was building

his house with chick-peas and cypress cones,

because he feared the stone’s revenge    

and he had treated us to gingerbread

by the royal fountain and his wife

had snakes twisted round her legs.

Because a house needn’t

be only stone but a door as well

and beggars are discreet in reminding us

that it is synthesis, sky and earth.

Because a house need be only

a chair or a plate-rack’s silence.

I know -- Knossos pointed to the door

and was annoyed that I held the cameo in my grasp.

The Prince of lilies has no hands,

God has called him to his eternal rest. 

Translated from the Greek by Yannis Goumas