Harmonium

Let it be decreed and duly inscribed:

The word of a poet’s passing
Shall be accompanied
By a pealing pandemic
Multitude of reads!

Village Coffeehouse, Summer 1969

Sunday morning after church, 40 years ago: My mother's brother's coffeehouse in my home village of Remmatia--one refrigerator, one sink, one tiny butane cooker for the preparation of Greek coffee, three small round metal tables, a few wooden chairs, a hard-packed dirt floor, and the village's only telephone.

From left to right: My first cousin on my father's side of the family, my father, the village priest, my uncle, my cousin John on my mother's side--the only person still alive--all captured in a room inundated with incredible, bright late morning light.

Machiavellian

Comforting

To know poets are
As good as their word—

It’s their politics
That’s disturbing.

À Rebours

Concealed  

In the golden autumn 

Leaves of the Judas tree, 

 

There is a solitary  

Goldfinch  

 

Whose every note threatens   

Betrayal.

 

 

 

Morning

The village was a hard place--a few white squares against
the mountain. No wells, no streams, a taste of cisterns on
the widow's lips who had brought him food--white cheese,
hard gray bread, black olives. She watched him eat and
told him to stay for the cool hours of evening and the
morning that would come alive like the light moving along
her lips now.

(From Sentences, 1976)

Metaphor

Wallace,

When we got to the moor,
We saw the one thing still

Moving on that mossy-like surface
Was a waterlogged semaphore.

Today as April 21, 1970

Who will calculate for us the cost of our decision to forget?
--George Seferis

For the past
three years, she's been at it,
nagging as I descend
the steps into the garden, bent
over, bringing the sky with me:
Elias, where's the sun? You forgot
the sun again. You know how
we depend on you.

Hag. How she stumbles
in her garden, blistering her knees
against the rocks, while I sit here,
idle, and think about it:
"You know how we depend on you..."

I should have been an owl in daylight
or a marble face dumb in the night.

It would have been easier then,
hating her.

(From Sentences, 1976)

NB: Today is the 36th anniversary of the fall of the repressive, brutal and despicable Greek junta which seized power on April 21, 1967; true to form, the US was one of the first countries--perhaps the first--to recognize the dictators.