When the world becomes a wasteland
and cities raise their walls
higher than the ancient temples,
when the night learns
new names for fear
and man ceases to recognize himself
in the face of another man,
the word remains.
Not the word that commands,
nor the one that sells,
nor the one that shouts from the screens
to conquer the silence,
but that other one,
more fragile than a flame,
which trembles between the lips
and yet refuses to die.
It comes to us from far away.
It comes from an ancient square
where a man asked
what it means to live justly;
it comes from eyes that sought
the beauty behind things,
from those who raised columns
so that thought
might also have a home.
Greece has not died.
It still breathes
in every unanswered question,
in every verse that rebels
against barbarism,
in every gaze that refuses
to reduce the other to a number,
to an enemy,
to a name that can be erased.
But now the barbarians
do not always arrive with swords.
Sometimes they arrive clad in haste,
in indifference, in algorithms,
in words emptied of meaning.
Sometimes they set fires without raising flames
and destroy without toppling a single stone.
They leave man
with no time to think,
no silence in which to listen to himself,
no memory to recall
that he once believed
dignity was sacred.
And then poetry rises up.
It has no armies.
It has no borders.
It does not know how to make weapons.
It has barely
a single fiery word,
a heart that persists,
a page left open
in the dead of night.
But that is enough.
Because a verse
can preserve a name
when everyone else wants to erase it.
It can preserve a tear
when the world
has learned to call it a statistic.
It can give back a face
to someone who was nothing more than a headline.
It can say ‘you’ where others only say ‘they’.
That is why I do not write
to save the world
—perhaps no poem can do that—,
but to prevent
the world from saving itself
at the expense of humanity.
I write so that beauty is not a luxury,
so that memory
does not turn to ruin,
so that the humanities
are not driven out
of the home they built
over the centuries.
I write because I still believe
that a human life
is worth more than its price,
that a tear
is worth more than a statistic,
that a single just word
can carry more weight
than a hundred speeches.
And as long as there remains
a voice capable of saying ‘no’,
a hand capable of writing ‘hope’,
eyes capable of looking
without turning away from pain,
poetry will still be there,
small as a seed,
stubborn as the light
that manages to shine through
a crack in the stone.
Perhaps it will not stop the storm.
Perhaps it will not bring down the walls.
But as long as someone reads
a verse to another human being
and both remain silent
after reading it,
Greece will continue to breathe,
beauty will still have
a place to take refuge,
and man, wounded,
weary, almost defeated,
will still have a word
with which to call
himself
human.