Lost Bird
Christos Lialios and Katerina Vazoura

“Lost Bird” is a book about abandonment. Photos thrown in the trash, postcards from baskets at flea markets, pages from books, mostly encyclopedias piled up in antique shops and texts from torn pages.

It is a collection of images, drawings and writings, which once gave us light, if only for a while, and then plunged into darkness. It is a mutual relationship that changes at the same time, an association of the old to the new that speaks of injustice and oppression, of lost beauty, our lost nature. It is the poetry we failed to write by the end of the line.

Ira Kohen / “End of the Line”

Must I read the Science Times to know
that the Monarchs’ migration
is a fragile journey?
With a small amount of human negligence
everything could disappear
My last thought as i finally fell
into a fitful sleep
My first thought as i picked up the telephone
to get the bad news.

Glamour will not save our wintering grounds
Better to stay a caterpillar and munch leaves
than to risk all for the dazzling moment
of flight and the priceless illusion of freedom?
Hardly.

A butterfly’s brain is only the side of a pin head,
yet it knows how to get to Mexico
hitching rides on winds and spiraling columns
of warm air
But the end of the Monarchs’ as we know them is here

I am learning to stay quietly in this apartment
with my mother waiting for Iakshmi
We are dead souls on a cyclical journey
Future tourists will come to marvel at our poems
festooning the gables of a broken civilisation
Motels will be named after us and children
will parade in Monarch costumes when the season
of our return is remembered.

Goodbye Elephant Goodbye Whale
Hello Aids Virus
Smaller is perhaps stronger after all
My dreams were bigger than any whale and sometimes
I dove even deeper.

Edited by Christos Lialios and Katerina Vazoura
Design by Studio Lialios Vazoura

Language: English
Pages: 312
Format: 150 × 215mm, soft cover with cotton dust jacket
Edition: 300 copies

July, 2024

ISBN: 978-618-87122-0-1