ILIOPOULOU-ZACHAROPOULOU, ELENI


ILIOPOULOU-ZACHAROPOULOU, ELENI

Eleni Iliopoulou-Zacharopoulou is a poet and essayist. She was born in Tropaia, Gortynia-Arcadia. She attended the Teachers’ Training College in Tripolis. Her book of poems Wind-Weaving was awarded the 2005 Athens Academy Prize. She is a member of the Authors Society, The National Society of Greek Authors, the International Pen Club and the Poets’ Circle.

 More about author: 
First name:  ELENI
Last name:  ILIOPOULOU-ZACHAROPOULOU
Projects: 

LEAVING THE LULL, Poems. Athens: Costas Valetas Editions, 1994, French Academy Award Lutèce

THE DECORATION OF D. JADÉ, Critical essay, Athens: Kallieris Editions, 1995

PUNCTUATION MARKS, Poems 1996-97. Athens: Private Edition, 1998, Parnassus Literary Society Award

MUTUAL TRANSFER. Poems. Athens: Friends’ Editions, 1999, 2007, Greek Society of Christian Studies Award

THE EXISTENTIAL N.D. KAROUZOS, Critical essay. Athens: Private edition, 2000, Athens: Friends’ Editions, 2009

WIND-WEAVING, POEMS. Athens: Friends’ Editions 2004, 2008, Translated by Yannis Goumas, Academy of Athens Award 2005

ON THE OTHER SIDE OF THE HORIZON, Narrative. Athens: Friends’ Editions, 2006

TIME RETURNS, Poems. Athens: Friends’ Editions, 2009

REFLECTIONS AND ESSAYS ON TEXTS, Essays. Athens: Friends’ Editions, 2009

REFLECTIONS AND ESSAYS, ON “ODE TO THE TEAMMATE” by Georgios Georgoussis. Essays. Athens: Friends’ Editions, 2013

SELECTED POEMS WIND-WAVING, 2014 AND CERTAINTIES DIMINISHING, 2016

COLOR REFRACTIONS, Essays, 2020

 


Address: 

Doukissis Plakentias  70-72, Τ.Κ. 115 23 Ampelokipi, Athens


Birth place:  Tropea, Gortynias Arkadias
Abstract title:  Poems
Abstract text: 

Certainties Diminishing

Kerkoporta
to Yannis Goumas
Deep inside me
I look for myself.
I find you
and become you;
I dwell in your silence.
I search for You –
Darkness and Light.
Here is my place;
my nest.
In my truth and lie
I entrench myself
and open the door.
Oh, come in!
There are no resistances.
In yes and no
I spent myself.
The incessant limits
“nail marks”.
Here is my place –
time expended .
Come right in
unarmed

2
and with no melee words.
I am looking for an innocent place,
where everyone
quietly bleeds.
Down to the Bottom
It seems that some events
had to be so;
Inappropriately
like the unfortunate ones,
devoid of sanctity.
The adverse ones you wove
with imagination and ignorance,
the omissions escaping.
You stretch,
become your self’s mirror.
You are sensitized in the multiple refractions;
reflections are you boundaries.
Now you know
that “living”
is infinitive time.
“Existing”-- “coexisting”
is an ambiguous teleological time.
“I’
means to understand others;
to live a part of everybody.
It means “I commune”
the need of all the earth –
its truth
in life and nothing.
The Honesty of Words
The words allusively
hovered in disorder.
They came to a deadlock,
like snowflakes on the windowpane
chilling inner space.
Recognizable entanglements.
Sometimes silence
is more honest
than portrayals;
the demolittions.
Thus lost are the aesthetics,
the integrity of dreams.
Outside the weather was clear skies
without sun leaving shadows.
It cearly delimited contours,
just as the clarity of words
The words
precise, sincere,
balance and harmonize
deviations.
The Paperweight
Impassively
I looked at the paperweight
on my papers,

3
a large brass key.
On its top
an idle inscription
justified its existence:
“I lost my door.”
With time
it appropriated the space.
It presses my notes;
it points out to the outstanding issues.
It silently upbraids me like a conspirator.
A key
means a home –
somewhere to cry all alone;
somewhere sacred to be loved.
A key
is a way –
meeting or parting.
Remember that key
years ago?
It broke one night in the front-door keyhole.
We came by the side-entrance,
the wrong way.
Ever since
we see life
through that
damaged keyhole.
The Sculpture
You return
a slow adaptation
to “Need”.
A meagre booty
of the land you doubt,
hungry for truth
you exist.
Emaciated dog –
a sculpture by Giacometti –
you walk bent over,
lost on the way.
You exist.
Wear and tear, wear and tear –
the earth’s unspent complaint –
absences are multiplying.
Something must always hurt us.
And you
orgiastic spring
“where are you going with so much beauty.”
I Am Not Writing About You
“Don’t write about me,”
you said to me
that unsuspecting summer.
And the garden grew green again.
Oleaster stems
are looking for you at your window;

4
closed shutters imply you.
The cypresses along the fence
are regarding me motionless.
The trees
are rustling your story.
And you are missing
missing from everywhere.
On my breast you grew
acrid roots
like the oleaster’s
bitter fruit.
“Don’t write about me,”
you had told me then.
And you departed the following summer.
One-Way Street
… and he didn’t speak;
he only showed with his hand.
“Speech is such a deceiver,” he’d say.
But I won’t keep quiet,
I told him.
Words are ideas and meanings;
they become acts.
They have their own destiny.
And if all has been said
there’s what has been forgotten.
I will not deny speech,
Crates of Thebes.
I will talk
about life,
its considerable reality
and balance.
For the revelation of truth
and the acceptance of “necessity”.
I will speak to the end
as resistance over time
with admiration
and the dream’s memory.
For the word I gave
and the magic of poetry.
The Rope Walker
Hovering again
in the rocky crevices
of verse.
To listen from the depths
of the minimum and the maximum
the conceivable and the inconceivable of the world.
You will meet
with yourself
with your own vanity.
And alone you will bleed.
Here in this city of steel―
exiled in time―
cowardly and indifferent ofr a handshake,

5
for the sensual beauty
of an approach.
And you, wanting poem,
tonight you are moving crabwise.
In the despotism of ineffable speech
you are stubbornly fighting back.
And the earth’s exile
the sky’s displeasure
and death by my side.


Peripatetic Words
I
As we climbed up the mountain
we talked
about the humble plainness of mastic trees,
the godliness of chamomiles,
the always open doors of parish churches;
about the monasticism in everyone’s chest,
the desert of a dry heart,
the thorn of conscience where God lives;
about the mountain hike
from repentance to forgiveness
and the feat of reaching the summit
that measures the height of love.
II
We talked about
the warm hands
in the glassy stare of the unexpected,
the insulting conceit
which is the origin of the void,
about the glory inscribed on the water;
about the splendour of the tragic ―
as an attitude to life ―
about the spirit in us,
which is a blaze;
and the ambiguous words
rendering existence false.
III
We talked about
the “awkward awe”
before the beauty of Creation
and the “breathtaking event”
that is Man.
From the Floor Below
Antigone,
I hear you coming back
from sorrow’s distant roads.
A dark anguish ―
impenetrable like an abyss ―
will ask again whether I love you.
The springtime colours
are not mirthful on your hair…
On your frightened eyelids balance
sobs and tears;
the world’s inexplicable law.
Blocked too the grey sky…

6
Lost in the earth’s wastes,
you go about begging for love.
O Antigone,
you early-darkened dawn,
dream’s bitter grievance,
my deep wound,
my dear, my dear...
The only thing I can do
is to love you and feel sad.


E-mail:  eliopzaxel@yahoo.gr