As the horsemen drew near,

the dust arrived first,

and the book opened to the forbidden page.

The white one shot arrows at the birds

that fed on my fruit.

From their feathers I made a crown and crowned him-

now, like a scarecrow,

he remembers his victories and weeps.

The red one carried a knife;

he burned and was extinguished in passion.

I cast his ashes into the lake, and a bleeding water lily grew.

The black one held a scale that tilted toward wrong.

Now a statue, he stands in the garden,

weighing oil and wine among the mimosas.

The pale one came with a scythe, silent at dusk;

he touched my wrinkles one by one.

I mounted his horse,

and we rode toward the seventh seal.

Georgia Makrogiorgou was born in Naousa and lives in Thessaloniki, Greece, where she works as an educator. She is the Vice President of the Thessaloniki Society of Writers and holds postgraduate degrees in Teaching English as a Foreign Language from the Hellenic Open University and in Creative Writing from the University of Western Macedonia. She regularly publishes book reviews in both print and online literary journals. Her published works include the novels Luck on the Walls (Gavriilidis, 2017), Dandelions (Paraxenes Meres, 2020), and Reflections (AΩ, 2023), as well as the poetry collections Light When Transplanted (Vakxikon, 2019) and It Blushes with Charcoal (Koukida, 2021).