Greek Tragedy

Waiting in line, Before the ATM of closed banks for 60 Euros to withdraw under the scourging sun Old and invalid people are submitted to this daily torture, constantly moaning, for Our country’s suffering and for our own devastation, While twenty-seven percent the unemployment has climbed Forty percent the salaries and pensions went down and twenty percent the taxes up Rendering hundreds of thousands of families poor with no money to feed themselves And their children When Close to one hundred thousand of our countrymen have attempted suicide of whom Ten thousand, unfortunately, have succeeded in ending their lives only in five years Because of the ruinous austerity measures taken to pay Greece's lenders Parthenon, is mourning Democracy's assassination in the place of its birth By the mighty creditors that suck the blood out of our veins The Greek government in agony has turn to our allies for help to restore our Economy and thus to prevent the catastrophe that is approaching, But the creditors, most of them anyway, with Germany leading the way, To obliterate Greece wish with their unbearable and inhuman terms they have set As though were our enemies and not our partners, because Humanity has been lost in their hearts and only for them the profit counts And I, one of the suffering Greeks, that shares the same lot as any, In anxiety, a few words try to arrange for the tragedy of Greece to illustrate as a New Euripides or Sophocles but to no avail, So I am waiting in line under the scourging sun, hoping my turn to come, The sixty Euros, if am lucky, to get into my hands before the AMT is empty! © Demetrios Trifiatis 15 JULY 2015