Human Condition

July 28, 2021 1 Comment

Nicholas Samaras's poem "Human Condition" originally appears in Issue No. 60: At Sea.

________

NICHOLAS SAMARAS
HUMAN CONDITION

Already, my thought enters the past
where everything is gone, blinking 
into finitude. Even this thinking, 
already fog and waver, verb become 
tensed, as time evaporates. The present 
is air and the past is vapour. I think 
of you entering the past tense of you, 
the wave of your hand as time goes 
transparent and the photograph fades. 
Everything ages to transparency, 
leaving a warm feeling we struggle 
to hold. Time fades us and 
vanishes, even this thinking, 
the image lived, gone, grasped after. 

________
Nicholas Samaras is from Patmos, Greece (the “Island of the Apocalypse”) and, at the time of the Greek Junta military dictatorship (“Coup of the Generals”) was brought in exile to be raised further in America. He’s lived in Greece, England, Wales, Belgium, Switzerland, Italy, Austria, Germany, Yugoslavia, Jerusalem, thirteen states in America, and he writes from a place of permanent exile. His first book, Hands of the Saddlemaker, won The Yale Series of Younger Poets Award. His current book is American Psalm, World Psalm (Ashland Poetry Press, 2014). He is completing a new manuscript of poetry and a memoir of his childhood years lived underground.

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