THE MAD
POMEGRANATE TREE
In these all-white courtyards
where the south wind blows
Whistling through vaulted arcades, tell me, is
it the mad pomegranate tree
That leaps in the light, scattering its
fruitful laughter
With windy willfulness and whispering, tell me,
is it the mad
pomegranate tree
That quivers with foliage newly born at dawn
Raising high its colours in a shiver of
triumph?
On plains where the naked
girls awake,
When they harvest clover with their light brown
arms
Roaming round the borders of their dreams-tell
me, is it the mad
pomegranate tree,
Unsuspecting, that puts the lights in their
verdant baskets
That floods their names with the singing of
birds-tell me
Is it the mad pomegranate tree that combats the
cloudy skies of the
world?
On the day that it adorns itself in jealousy
with seven kinds of feathers,
Girding the eternal sun with a thousand
blinding prisms
Tell me, is it the mad pomegranate tree
That seizes on the run a horse’s mane of a
hundred lashes,
Never sad and never grumbling–tell me, is it
the mad pomegranate tree
That cries out the new hope now dawning?
Tell me, is that the pomegranate tree waving in
the distance,
Fluttering a handkerchief of leaves of cool
flame,
A sea near birth with a thousand ships and
more,
With waves that a thousand times and more set
out and go
To unscented shores-tell me, is it the
pomegranate tree
That creaks the rigging aloft in the lucid air?
High as can be, with the blue bunch of grapes
that flares and celebrates
Arrogant, full of danger–tell me, is it the mad
pomegranate tree
That shatters with light the demon’s tempest in
the middle of the world
That spreads far as can be the saffron ruffle
of day
Richly embroider with scattered songs-tell me,
is it the mad
pomegranate tree
That hastily unfastens the silk apparel of day?
In petticoats of April first and cicadas of the
feast of mid-August
Tell me, that which plays, that which rages,
that which can entice
Shaking out of threats their evil black
darkness
Spilling in the sun’s embrace intoxicating
birds
Tell me, that which opens its wings on the breast
of things
On the breast of our deepest dreams, is that
the mad pomegranate tree?
--Odysseus Elytis, translation by Edmund Keeley
