This town has crippled me, just as long ago
a town might have crippled me,
with its barracks its empty factories
its black walls topped by broken glass
its narrow streets, treeless, dry
its swarthy, salty women
mobile, fluid, with coal-black eyes
olive skins lightly perspiring
just enough for transient, fleeting love
on shadowy, half-deserted sea-shores
with their stones, tar, rust and thorns.
This town cures me with its nights
the nights of my country that never change.
This poem has not been translated into any other language yet.
I would like to translate this poem
''As long as memory lives in me, I will return, '' is how Patrikios describes working-out in his writing of his experiences of resistance, banishment and exile that have determined and marked his life and work.