Collective edition of the poems of Titos Patrikios, Volume I (1943-1959).

VERSES, 2

Verse that screams
verse that stands up like swords
verse that threatens the established order
and within their few feet
make or overturn the revolution,
useless, fake, pretentious,
because no verse today overturns regimes
no verse mobilizes the masses.
(What masses? Between us now -
who thinks about the masses?
At most, individual redemption, if not elevation.)
That's why I don't write anymore
to offer paper rifles
weapons made of empty and hollow words.
Just to raise a corner of the truth
to shed some light on our fabricated life.
As much as I can, and as long as I can.

August 1957

"However, more than the years of the resistance during the occupation, the personal ethics and the definition of Patrikios are determined by the conditions of exile. Isolation, destitution, physical decay, thirst and longing for love, the lethargy of the mind are dramatized with increasing frequency during the period mainly of the "Apprenticeship". The anthropological consequences of these conditions are a productive motif: the reintegration of the outcast into public life is undermined, internally, by the ghosts of dead friends and the memories of a companionship that has definitively disintegrated.
However, the theme that intensifies with the passage of time in Patrikios is the exercise and function of poetry within the political and party space: the limits of its effectiveness, its relieving escapes, its eclectic drama in the face of public events."

D. N. Maronitis, Poetic and political ethics, 1976