Moving

MOVING / Yannis Ritsos translated by Edmund Keeley Our mothers would die early. How did we grow up like this in the hands of strangers. Winter mornings, with a piece of wet bread and a little sugar. The alarm clocks cut our sleep in half. We would go out into the street unwashed. We would change houses every now and then, always leaving something behind: a trunk with a few books, a broken mandolin. We would go back some Sunday, we said, to pick them up. We never went back. And that cloth suitcase in the middle of the empty room, tattered, with its belt bindings spread out on the floor—in that we'd left an old talisman with black string, along with those lewd photographs thumbed through a thousand times, all of naked old-fashioned women with the broad pelvis, small waist, and enormous breasts. One of them was lying face down as though crying. And she actually was crying in front of the wall with the rusted nails that were holding spread scissors and a pair of braces. 62 · The Missouri Review ...