SMARAGDI MITROPOULOU

 

 

If I Had Lost You

 

If I had lost you,

I would have had no homeland left.

 

The roads would be foreign dust,

the houses stone without memory,

and the sky an emptiness that does not answer.

 

What is a homeland,

if not the one who calls your name and you turn?

 

What is land,

if those you loved no longer walk upon it?

 

If I had lost you,

I would return to an empty world,

and everything would turn to ash.

 

But I found you.

And the world became a place again.

 

And I learned that homeland is not the soil…

it is the one you never want to lose.

 

The Weavers

 

Four hands

and a single breath.

The thread begins at the center,

where there is no name and no time

only warm memory,

like blood that remembers.

Each woman weaves from elsewhere.

One knows the beginning, another the weight,

the third the silence,

the fourth the ending unspoken.

They do not speak.

The fingers are enough.

In the tension of the woven cloth

generations are heard,

tears that never fell,

names that survived

because someone held them.

The thread burns.

It is not wool

it is fate.

And as they weave,

the world is held together:

not by swords or oaths,

but by women who bind what others have broken.

 

SMARAGDI MITROPOULOU

 

SMARAGDI MITROPOULOU was born in Athens. She studied History and Archaeology in Greece and Great Britain. She serves in Secondary Education. Her poetic and prose work has received awards and distinctions in Greece and abroad. She is a member of the Women’s Literary Society, a member of the Executive Board of the Writers Capital International Foundation, an editor of Writers International Edition magazine, and a Lifetime Fellow Member of the International Society for Development and Sustainability (ISDS), based in Japan. She has published nine books in Greece, covering a wide range of literary genres (short stories, poetry, theatre, novella, and fairy tales). Her poems and short stories have been translated into English, Chinese, Spanish, as well as Taiwanese and Bengali, and have been published on websites and in magazines across Europe, Asia, and Latin America.