APRIL FOOL POETRY SLAM

Hey!  Today is the first day of National Poetry Month.  Here are a few poems I wrote in Greece in 1984.  (If not now, then when, right?)

I wrote most of these poems during the spring as we were driving from Athens through the Peloponnese to Gythion, where a car ferry would take us to Chania on Crete.  Others were written later in the summer when we visited other Greek islands.  The weather in the Peloponnese was tumultuous, as only spring weather can be.  The meadows and hillsides were brilliant green from dart-and-dash rainstorms, and the sky alternated between bottomless blue and finite gray.  These were my impressions as we headed for Crete, bound for other Aegean Islands, the Cyclades, and the Dodecanese. 

SKY LAUNDRY

A spring torrent--              

The rain drives, and so do we,

Parting Nature’s linen.

Sheets of rain

Hung out to wet the sky.

Gray clouds beard the peaks,

But their thin disguises

Fool not the fields of poppies below.

Their fragile red crepe paper beauty is a narcotic,

Taking us higher than this mountain goat of a road.

                                                           

CHECKERS

Black and white sheep

Playing checkers on a green hillside.

One scrambles to the top,

His iron bell heralding his triumph.

“King me!” he exclaims.

“Never,” murmur the purple anemones

Watching the turquoise undulations,

Lap lapping against the rocky shore below.

“Poseidon rules here.”

AGHIA MARINA

In the ruined temple of Aghia Marina

She taps her cigarette.

Ashes fall--

Burnt offerings to the goddess who treads this high ground?

Perhaps….

I have seen three packs of Greek cigarettes

Left for the Virgin

In a church in Myteline on Easter eve.

An amusing (if pathetic) blasphemy?

Or the descendant of sacrificial flesh

Kindled on an ancient pyre?

FOR LAKIS

Just one day in the Greek spring sun

Transfigures Lakis

Into a bronzed Greek god.

By summer’s end

He will be as black

As a Kalamata olive,

Soaked in Aegaen brine.

MYKONOS

Human lepidoptera

In their sandy bell jars.

They lie pinned

By the Mykonos sun—

So many willing butterflies.

EXEDRAE

Each olive tree

Has its own semi-circular stone podium

From which to address the sea below.

A steep hillside of orators

Telling the same ancient tale.

THE AQUEDUCT

The ancient aqueduct no longer carries water

But the sounds of a thousand birds,

A swollen brook,

And the conversations of sheep

Who browse the grass

Swallowing up its fallen stones.

ST. GEORGE’S CHURCH

St. George’s Church perches over Athens,

Higher than the Parthenon

And whiter,

But for all its claims to life everlasting,

Never so eternal.

ECSTASY

Through the mist that follows the rain

One can just make out ghostly fields

Of carnations, wild iris, rape, and poppies--

Pink, white, yellow, and red

Chromatize the gray gloom.

And the orange and lemon trees!

Fruiting and flowering all at once,

So ecstatic is their awakening.

(The painfully amateurish sketches are from the sketchbook I kept during our eight months in Greece.) 

Happy Poetry Month!  Make a rhyme.  Have a good time!

Keep it real!

Marilyn