Peter Lyssiotis
M A S T ER T H I E F
PROLOGUE
MELBOURNE – A Monday in April – 8:00 am
I was doing O.K.;
maybe I’d even got to the point where I couldn’t do that much about who
I was ― then this
the cruelest miracle of all:
the miracle of a homeland.
A wanting to connect with the first words I spoke
to reach back without planes, passenger liners, passports, tickets; customs
officials, vaccinations, schedules.
I’ve relied on my Companions ― to show me where the struggle is
what courage can make.
I’d set these Comrades on 6 monolithic granite rocks ― slap bang in the
middle of the ocean ― in a more or less straight line between Here & There….
Most of my Comrades are dead ― that’s O.K.
because it’s dying which lets you more easily accept people – it also makes it
possible to offer and receive forgiveness… more readily.
I’m betting my history on making this crossing
though I’ll have to be careful, because at 74, nostalgia is killing me ― to be
truthful it’s become my third parent.
Imagine you’re here with me, on the shore; I’ve dressed for the crossing in a
heavy overcoat and you’ve come to say goodbye. It’s April ―
over there it’s Spring … let’s say it’s 2025 … a Monday … 8 in the morning.
It’s not clear right now if this is another one of those decisions which seems
truly good, but seriously misunderstands the world ― I have to ask if there’s
room in my life for another misunderstanding.
I want to write about this as a 20-year-old might …
later, I’ll get annoyed
and ask myself why at 74, I’m still writing juvenilia.
There are things we can do and other things which are too hard to even think
about … years pass and suddenly everything becomes too hard ― that’s what
I’m going up against …
so, to make the journey between here & there, my dreaming has to be good.
Just as I’m ready to make the leap
my phone pings ― it’s a group text from my Comrades: how come you want to cross
these dark waters, now ― if you were already dead, it would be different …
I’ve had the good luck to love these people ― trust them. And I believe they
still glow with the same ardour I loved when I first met them.
But I’m not only afraid of what I’m trying to live through right now, I’m afraid
of what’s to come ― of what else there is to lose:
is this crossing then, how I’m supposed to defend against this fear?
I don’t care ― now’s the time
so, I LEAP!
1ST ROCK
The air in my dreaming becomes fresher …
and the memories I’ve gathered round me become clouds which push back the
aloneness.
Below ― the dark water: broken chairs, a picture in a frame, aerosol cans, a
toilet scrubber, a torn white shirt, bottles, everything plastic and credit cards
from eroding cities clatter against the 1st ROCK.
(Water and sea are a part of Romiosini ― or Greekness: Socrates nailed it
when he said Greeks were frogs living around the edges of a pond … the
pond has no life without the frogs and the frogs have no life without the pond
… then there were Xenophon’s 10,000 who finally seeing the ocean near
Trabzon uttered <θάλασσα, θάλασσα> believing salvation was at hand.)
There’s my grandmother and there’s the village ― Xylotymbou …
both live in my breathing ― both a single precious thought: they show me that
something else is possible; so I care for them as I would care for a plant … I
water them ― sometimes with tears; grace them with dreaming; let them catch
the light of day and move them next to my bed at night.
I left the village when I was 3, with my mother … I went back when I was 25:
that’s a long stretch of absence: during which I went from Greek in a Cypriot
dialect to English with an Australian accent.
Winds which begin somewhere in North Africa blow across Xylotymbou.
The 2 of us embrace
and I’m more alive than what I know what to do with ―
yet, she’s smoke in my hands
ANGELOU
She holds my head; turns it towards her breast.
People say love is everything, but really it can only do so much ― then,
nothing, but
in her house, love never gets to retire
my heart finds its shape again;
it’s a wonder that I can keep this joy to myself without causing lasting damage!
I choose to be small forever.
At the bottom of each word she spoke there was a knotted olive root
and there’s that vow of poverty she’s taken: to say things simply …
The things we said are there ― locked in her wooden hope chest.
She distrusted big, gassy words ― believing instead in small words and
proverbs, parables, aphorisms … fables. She’d sit back; consider, then reach
back ― way back ― to find a response, then speak it, simply ― leaving just the
right amount of untold around it.
There was never any dying in her eyes ― and if God
was at last to believe in us, He’d need to come to my grandmother’s house.
Bent. Broad, with chubby cheeks. Thick legs and calves.
Plump fingers:
She sits in front of the mirror each morning; endlessly plaiting her long hair .
Morning makes things look simple, doesn’t it? Over a shot of coffee, some
bread and honey and yoghurt she asks me what I’d dreamt that night. I say
Nothing. She takes a beat and says That’s not good, because last night someone else got
the dreams which were meant for you.
At 25 I was making my way through The Canon: Joyce, Whitman, Melville,
Borges, Sherlock Holmes, Celine, Homer, Camus, Calvino … and writing …
making sure she could see me: (My Grandson The Brain) … What are you doing?
she asks. Writing. Poetry. Ah! she says Make sure then, that your words are round, like
an O, so they can roll out into the world.
She sets the bread down on the wooden table ― and as she does, the absence
of those who are gone is swept out of the kitchen: crumbs.
The bread my grandmother baked every Friday had in it all the words she
would use that week…
she would cross herself and kiss any bit of bread which fell from the table
and when she’d kiss me in the same way ― all blame would lift.
Aphorisms swarmed around her like bees heavy with honey ―
listen: When a clown moves into the palace, he doesn’t become a king; the palace becomes a
circus.
She is that
gentle nest
for every small word.
I watch her fall asleep: in there she becomes a thin, lit candle ― like the one
on her mantlepiece which illuminates the icon of Saint Marina.
One of those stars under which my grandmother laboured is still out there ―
persisting ― unnamed but still shining ― reminding me to keep listening.
(If her eldest son, my father, hadn’t thrown such a long shadow, would I have
got to that moment where I would love the both of them, so unreservedly?)
I got to love her by lamplight.
She never adjusted to electricity ―
in a similar way, that holy texts never adjust to day light…
Her voice rises
but never beyond
the height of her geraniums
Listen to my grandmother 2 more times: When a farm worker lost 2 fingers to
a harvester she said: Well, if you’re born to be hanged, you can be sure you won’t drown
and when one of the women in the neighbourhood repeated the rubbish Mad
old Manolis was sprouting in the coffee shop, she shook her head and said If
having a white beard was really a sign of wisdom, then my goats would be philosophers.
Her neighbourhood is the world.
The seldom rain washes her face ― makes her seem transparent:
It’s my tears
which fall
from her eyes
I can pull off the occasional miracle with her:
today I brought her back to life from a black head scarf and some strands of
her long hair ― which I’d souvenired nearly 50 years ago.
We are sitting at the wooden table in her kitchen; eating chicken with okra
and potatoes. We’re talking about her early years (she was born in 1900) and
Xylotymbou. She picks at her food like a sparrow. I finish and mop up the
last of the sauce with a piece of the bread she’d baked. She crosses herself
and gets up ― labouriously. I’ve learnt to put out my right arm ― which she
always ignores, preferring her walking stick. She looks at me and says Do you
know that when the camel was asked why its neck was so crooked, it replied What part of
me isn’t? . . . see you can’t just point to one mistake, because all there is, is mistakes … look
around you ― that’s what unbelief has made of God’s good world.
Her hands: 2 rabbits
resting against each other in a field lit by the moon
I understand a looser grip ― a sweeter lightness…
there’s grace when we’re together
I bend; dip my right index finger into the water surrounding the Rock and
write I love you on its dark surface.
I’m not leaving yet … but I am going … I am: but not just yet.
Another peek into her bedroom ― and I’ll go ― the mirror she’d cover in
black cloth when a friend or a close relative died, isn’t there ―
it hangs in our corridor in East Burwood: reflecting what’s in front of it ―
it used to do so much more
2ND ROCK
I leap …
life follows
Sure, I’ve thought about making this journey before; and made it countless
times in my head … but even so
there’s always a shiver between each thought.
I’m destined for the sacrifice zones;
or
is my imagining sending me on another shallow entertainment ― and
straight out of central casting, too; formula-driven and in the regulation 3
stages:
central character, a man (me)
embarks on a journey to his homeland (Cyprus)
and returns (with a swarm of questions).
There’s something W.E.B. DuBois called double consciousness: the sense of
looking at yourself through the eyes of other people … and right now
I’m looking at myself through the eyes of Nikos Kazantzakis … my head is
numb
though I notice the oleander beside his table is in blossom.
How do we live away from a place we love? Maybe Joseph Brodsky was right;
maybe Conrad and Nabakov were right, too ― they never returned to their
birthplace ― each tried to cure himself of their homeland … they reckoned on
what they’d left behind being dissolved … return, they figured and you’d have
to face the absence or defacement of what you treasured. On the other hand,
Pasternak, Mahfouz and Shotokovitch may have been right ― they never left.
I bring him to me with the wizardry of 2 black and white photographs I took
nearly 50 years ago in Crete: one of his grave ― with its simple wooden cross
and the other of a town square where the Ottomans hung 2 partisans from a
plane tree ― Kazantzakis was made to stare at the 2 martyrs by his father.
When I visited his grave he gave me the key … I was 25 … after that, there
was no need to knock …
trouble was, every time I used the key I understood, as if for the first time,
how we live lives we’re not very good at.
NIKOS KAZANTZAKIS
I’ve got my orders …
the mission: to disappear, one more time …
I can smell the fear coming off me.
What can you do with another person’s pain
… take it and re-shape it so it fits you or
make a path of it so you can walk with it?
I roll his blessing round my mouth 3 times and taste:
I hope for nothing.
I fear nothing.
I am free.
His mission was to release me from the gilded cage of 6th Century B.C.
Greece … by asking The Big Questions. To a kid coming very slowly out of
his teens he showed me how modern Greece had been gifted someone who
could stand on writing’s Main Stage … along with Nietzsche, Dostoevski,
Proust, Mann, Kafka and the rest. He gave me permission to be Greek ― to
feel Romiosini at a time when embarrassment was the default position … and
I’m still listening … ear to the Cretean earth … to the struggle … between the
past and present, justice and injustice, faith and doubt, body and soul, between
one fratricidal Greek and another fratricidal Greek
between him and me.
Always on a mission, so together we waited
to snare God alive … and when we eventually cornered Him, we sort of
understood how The Word, God, Nikos and I were …
unfinished.
Exhausted, we rest
beneath a burning cypress tree ―
beneath a burning cypress tree ―
beneath so many layers of blue
yes, they’ve been times ― years even ― when I abandoned him; deliberately let
him become dust and bone ― but we never let each other go completely and
never have we even thought of waving goodbye …
it doesn’t matter which of your books I’m reading, I’m always thinking of the
words in one of your other books …
but there are other things, too, I do with your books: I sit beside them
there’s a row of them in our bookcase … do I intend to opening them again?
… having them there is enough.
Is the reveal that art is a shadowy arena … a mix of murkiness and lies and
witchcraft?
But I have to ask: is our most private thinking ― thinking which address the
unseen, happen only in the language one is born into?
Am I just writing this or am I ready to live it?
Isn’t writing about listening for what you’ve not heard before … exploring
the bits of you, you didn’t think existed
then looking into the minds of those people who made you?
… like any son I’m always looking for ways to show the parts of me which
have been exiled.
The storm was at its height:
the church broke in 2
and saints were seen
running into the street
I believe there’s a type of blood, that once shed, doesn’t dry …
I break off a sprig of jasmine, hold it in my left hand and LEAP …
I travel on the jasmine’s scent
3RD ROCK
What book have I packed for this journey?
There is always a book… if the worst happens and the rescuers rummage
through the pockets of my overcoat they’ll find it ― Yes, this was a good man …
something by Mahmoud Darwish … or Edmond Jabes or Albert Camus…
when Shelley’s body was recovered from the ocean, a collection of John Keats’
poetry was under his shirt.)
My dreaming brings with it minnows which throw themselves against this
Rock and shine like sharpened knives.
I keep on looking at the dark water
imagining the waves yet to come ― all that anarchy.
I’ve got time to think of how much I’d like Theodorakis to score then conduct
what I write here … and of course, I want Farandouri to sing it ―
But there’s no time for all that ― I’m moving like air through pine needles
MIKIS THEODORAKIS / MARIA FARANDOURI
The first word of The Iliad is wrath ―
the Furies are always patient ― waiting outside the door ― ready to continue
their never-to-be-finished work …
nonetheless the song out there tells me I’m one of a multitude of wasps
swarming around the heads of cruel governments, multinationals, kleptocrats,
and warmongers ― that I should believe in my strength ― besides;
they can’t swat all of us …
can they?
I pick up the scent ― follow it and in my own way begin to resist.
know: that we are not made to drag chains.
know: how to embrace other people.
know: how to link arms with the truth
… don’t be afraid ― as things fall apart we see more clearly what they’re
made of.
So is it time …
or should I rest?
Does being at peace mean accepting things as they are … is that what being
fulfilled means ― or
does that mean you’re already dead … or
should I be that bit of orbiting space junk looking down at the rest of the
world without ever interacting with it …
or should I declare an armistice?
NO … the song goes on
the struggle goes on
it insists that I keep myself open to grief ― not to be, is to live without the capacity
to care it says.
Is it time?
I know what songs are now:
they’re that thing which lets you have the same dream, at the same time, on the
same night, with a stranger.
I know how music works now: it’s an idea, imagining and listening to itself in
the darkness.
Now I know the gift music can bring:
it pledges to help a life see what it can’t recognize on its own.
These songs: won’t let dreaming be exiled.
These songs: tell me the only way is never to play dead.
These songs: love me and millions of others.
The big man conducts ― as if he’s trying to save himself from drowning …
and on the way to saving himself he makes you pull on your shoes and hit the
street ― where millions of people just like yourself ― greet you.
Sitting at the same table with him again, I welcome those questions which have
walked beside me for what seems forever …
Ah! to feel as Erich Fried put it … the happiness of hoping for happiness ― I start
to sing
and the song grabs the sky and brings it to my front door …
the Furies quake
and there’s that creaking sound behind my eyes ― tears …
is it time?
Her lips curve into the shape of a small row boat ― and I’m rowing ― easily;
yet I don’t know if I’m rowing to Heaven’s gate or drifting towards the fires of
Hell.
An Arab proverb tells me: When danger approaches, sing to it ― she
does …
a diamond on the path back to the mine.
Hear her: and you’ll understand how someone can send the fear away.
Hear her: and you’ll realise you understand more than what you know how to
say.
Hear her: and you’ll say Beautiful.
Is it time?
The 2 of them: hold me, – breaking –, in their arms.
The 2 of them: tell me the only thing left to do is everything.
The 2 of them: know that while we stand together we won’t fall … and even if
we do, they say, it’s not a big deal ― what really counts is how we land.
Both of them say: Get up … it’s time
By now I know the sky fairly well ― so I LEAP ―
and below?
one eye belongs to the fisherman;
the other to the ferryman
4th ROCK
I lurch mid-leap … I’m tossed against a grey cloud by a dry and savage wind
from the East.
The waves below are beating against the 4th Rock ― searching for a purpose.
I look down …
and between my 2 arms, 2 seas sing ―
my hair becomes ocean.
I’ve lost any interest in eternities and forevers … any flavour they may have
had, got leached back there: when I was too young to be reasonable … both
kill off meaning ― besides neither will come to the rescue when I take another
fall … eternity and forever are another one of those prayers ― postcards sent
skywards, asking for favour in the forlorn hope that someone will get it, read it
then do something about it.
Reality, on the other hand, exists and when it comes knocking, it knocks in
their voice.
The spooked ocean swells …
I let my shadow loose on its dark waters
YIANNIS RITSOS / TASOS LEIVADITIS
I can see the 4th Rock … it has a fissure running from the top to about
halfway down …
I’ve got to really stick this landing.
2 shadows bridge the fracture ―
2 men: calm as a mirror: reflecting passing clouds … I hear them say Beautiful
about the things all of us should be able to see ― but can’t.
I make a soft landing ― through a familiar wound.
See they say, the world will change if you stare hard enough into its wounds.
Stop.
Tell me again: don’t dream in predictable ways.
Tell me again: you’ll never save anything which you don’t love.
Tell me again: the dead don’t sleep through everything.
there is always AND.
So I won’t be left out of this world …
I know nothing happens to 1 person alone …
I’m learning there’s no invasion as scary as love …
and maybe the worst of our suffering happens when we won’t acknowledge
the pain of other people …
The weight was never going to lift, was it?
(Both Yiannis and Tasos came to me in such a fathomless way that even on a
first encounter, they took me beyond my depth and quickly became events in
my life.)
What to do with this longing ― this love; when so often the feelings I most
guard and treasure are only a prelude to loss, pain … anxiety
and fear; but they tell me again
persist
be amazed
and damn the fear
so The Beast roars ― well and good: respond ― write ― then shove the paper
down its ugly throat and wait for it to choke.
Like any pilgrim, I need to be unburdened ― so I’m willing to be a witness to
what love can do; to see how much generosity a heart can hold.
We are resolved:
we won’t be broken by the things we can’t change … the things we
think we can’t endure … love will abide ― even when memory fails
so tonight I take the street home with me.
(… but here’s Tasos’ wig, again ― I wish he’d wear the damned thing instead
of leaving it lying around ― I just hate picking it up.)
a stray ribbon of light
freezes the jackals
feasting at the back door
The weight was never going to be bearable, was it?
Tell me the truth ―
but tell it like the earth hatched it.
I’m resolved:
no more thinking that simply by living I have in some magical way
made the world a better place ―
2 shadows turn the corner:
red geraniums
in their hands
Poetry rises into the everyday air from beneath bloodied bandages.
Their 2 names like layers of paint splashed over the same wall …
it’s there that I look for my face in their years.
I’m resolved:
to share a pulse with the world.
Apollinaire dares the artist to go right to the edge ― or die. I’ll take the
challenge ― I’ll LEAP into the young sky above me.
(P.S. I’m pretty sure Yiannis has been sleeping in my bed ― it’s that smell
of Paco Rabanne … I knew he smothered himself in it ― but really, in the
afterlife, as well!)
5th ROCK
Like a yellow wildflower, I attach myself to the edge of the 5th Rock. I’m
comfortable …
and from there I sit and watch the films currently screening in my head ― they
show me that a man is destined never to come home: in John Ford’s The
Searchers, the John Wayne character, Ethan Edwards casts himself adrift in the
end … then, in Wim Wenders’ Paris Texas the Harry Dean Stanton character,
Travis, is lost ― totally homeless
… there are other ways of thinking about the world and celluloid is one of
them.
Below:
the ocean makes another effort to shake off the moon from spreading itself
on the topmost part of the waves.
If the surfaces of our living are bright and false, what is true is somewhere else
― down there
or in the darkness of a room ―
or in a cinema ― or in those sounds and voices coming from just below the
surface of the snow ― somewhere in Northern Greece …
listening I wonder how much of the language I was born into I’ve shaken off
and how much of me has been cast out with it.
Why chase down Greekness/Romiosini when the country itself has
abandoned its better parts; and let itself become a doormat ― an economic
satellite of Germany?
Enter Theo Angelopoulos
THEO ANGELOPOULOS/ELENI KARAINDROU
… we don’t get to step outside history …
so remembering is a reason to find new ways home ― the way Alexander does
when he spies contemporary Athens from behind a hill in the 19th Century
(Alexander The Great).
The notion that an artist takes a leading hand in making clear the history of
a country by combing through the past to set up the possibility of a shared
future, isn’t that far-fetched, is it?
What am I watching: dream memory or historical nightmare … the borders
here are unreliable ― eventually they will probably disintegrate all together:
from behind a half-opened window an old man leans forward ― his hazel
eyes skirt the shore then look way, way out … searching for a Greece he can
recognise …
finding instead a sorrow large enough to devour him ― slowly.
I spoke Greek at home ― up to the time I left when I was 26. My parents sent
me to the one Greek language school in Melbourne, on Bourke St., next to the
Tivoli Theatre; up a flight of stairs, every Tuesday and Friday after day school,
on the 4D tram. For 7 years. Even our children only spoke Greek at home,
until they learnt English primarily from Sesame Street and Play School ― we
also sent them to Greek school ― every Friday night … we believed. But it
wasn’t my parents, the teachers at Greek school or my parents’ friends who
showed me what Greekness in the 20th Century looked like: being a vassal
state to The Great Powers; the dictatorships; The Famine; the Civil War, which
like all civil wars ― in Spain, the U.S., Sri Lanka, Nigeria, in the Sudan … ,
Ireland have never ended; the fire sale which saw the English, the French and
the U.S.A. bring Greece to its knees, then pluck out its eyes …
all this was left to Angelopoulos;
Sure I got The Golden Age, Homer, Athens and Sparta, Alexander,
Byzantium, the Ottomans, Smyrni and the Turks ―
but there was more …
and that was left to Angelopoulos and his travelling players to unfold ― slowly
― the struggles of the recent past, the scepticism about modernisation …
I’ve watched
as he’s called me to find some respect for the country’s ability to take whatever
the world powers throw at it.
To get some idea of the history around me, I had to turn away from the world:
Come in, Theo. Welcome cinema.
A single sadness always attracts another; then another … I’m one of those
sorrows:
to learn, as Camus tells me in The First Man, my … shoulder against a friend’s with
confidence … the longing, yes, to live still more, to immerse himself in the greatest warmth
this earth could give …
Theo and me.
Have I closed myself in this dark, empty cinema ― waiting to see something
else apart from doubt? But really, do I want anything else? …
How much company can these shadows be:
phantoms, black umbrellas, weddings, yellow, rain and fog ― elastic national
borders; the rage of history; the dispossessed; people exiled in their own
country; betrayal… legends; fairytales; modern Europe; contemporary Greece
then, more yellow
and the marrow in these big bones?
Eleni Karaindrou
with her bird-like scores ― alternating between feathery and frosty …
delivered with the sense that there’s a total silence at their edge.
She knows that what is really sad can’t be explained
yet, it leaves inside me, a quiet Spring.
She breaks my falls
and keeps my heart above the darkest water.
For all the regret … the disappointments… all the
avoiding ―
even after sitting for so long in Angelopoulos’ theatre, I wonder how such
slight activity, caught in long, slow takes, hand in hand with such a weightless
score can leave me so bruised.
Bruised or not, I’m ready to make the LEAP; again … By now
it’s like plunging into mercury (remember Cocteau’s Orphee?)
A gull flying next to me screams ― or is it an angel ― scorched by its own
divinity?
… whatever it is, later
it will drop like a stone
6th ROCK
THE MONASTERY OF AYIOS GIORGIOS, MAVROVOUNI, CYPRUS
If I’m going to agree with Czeslaw Milosz when he writes Language is the only
homeland I’m in trouble because my Greek is at best, a muddle.
The 6th Rock is the island itself
but why it’s Mavrovouni and at the monastery of Ayios Giorgios, is a puzzle
… I’m not the massively devout person my mother would have liked me to be
… but like Pasolini,
I have a nostalgia for belief
so here I am … and I do love it here because in this small space there’s a cross-
section of the forces which fuel the island. The monastery was built on the
ruins of a Byzantine church and now there are the sounds of 7 monks, bells,
liturgies and worshippers rising from the dry hills surrounding the monastery
― which sits in a valley. On the barren hills behind the monastery is a military
checkpoint: razor wire, guard dogs, watch towers and Greek Cypriot conscripts
with automatics. Across from these young men is a mined, no-mans-land. On
the opposing hills there are Turkish Cypriot conscripts, more razor wire and
artillery. White helicopters with U.N. markings monitor the zone. This is the
Green Line. In front of the monastery is a bitumen road and off that there’s
a mine which produces the pigment, umber: the story goes that Vermeer
insisted on using this umber for his shadow areas. Around the mine there’s
a processing plant … so within this cramped space there are 3 distinct strata
― the 3 major blocks on which the island’s history clings: the military; the
ecclesiastical and the commercial.
By the time I get to the monastery I’m very good at saying goodbye;
I promise myself not to ask for my heart back.
Each time I’m here it’s Spring, and once again
it fills my mouth with beautiful skies.
God may have made more beautiful monasteries than the one at Mavrovouni
― but He didn’t.
I listen for the laughter of the olive trees ― they’re usually so responsible and
serious ― religious;
their branches bend:
angels stoop down for a closer look.
It’s happening again:
I stand on the bank of the rivulet which runs down hill from the monastery,
peering into its slow water ― my reflection floats lazily downstream ― without
me; the water lets out a muffled sound ― in a voice I didn’t know it had.
It’s a path
marked by questions
and thistles
In the twilight, the dry hills shine in all their poverty.
By now the fearless
swallows are asleep
in their ingenious nests
The moon appears at its loveliest … then as if embarrassed, heads for the
wooden bridge ― hides under it.
The things I’ve done; the things I’ve left undone; the things I’ve imagined:
here, they run together.
(The friend I left behind in 1974 calls from the dark ― I let him climb into
my sleep; at his last footfall I catch myself about to scream because I think
he’ll suffocate me … but he stops ― lays his head on my chest and falls asleep
lightly.
Soldiers, razorwire, minefields, watchtowers, flags: yes, another people who
have had history done to them.
Am I being truthful ―
or have I been telling it the way it should have happened?
I’m getting used to it now ― being surrounded by ghosts ― and not only at
twilight, slowly
I’m learning to live with meeting the souls of other people: my grandmother’s;
my father’s; my mother’s … but tell me, how do I get round the shock of
meeting my own soul?
Every saint needs a story and I’m part of The Elder’s. (This Sunday he became
a vine trellis ― children were hanging from his beard.)
I’ve picked my spot:
to watch angels trying to do all the things we do ― and failing.
to wait for what is true to become true.
to see the Baptist ― or is it The Elder point to some greater glory.
If ever a promise was made that the rest of the day’s hours would show up,
then Mavrovouni would be the place where that promise would be fulfilled ―
first.
Tonight the mountain will
hold itself still
and after that …
I’m still clutching that burning rope linking me to CYPRUS …
Is the homeland that fine fish bone, which once it snags in the throat won’t be
moved… or is it
that empty bit of sky that planes routinely plummet through and eventually
recover from…
I wake up with my lips pressed against my left arm: did I taste Cyprus in my
sleep?
Did the island come to me ― weeping, again?
Why am I trying to map something which was never really visible to me?
My dead father’s voice
is beside me : gets me to believe
that it’s a wonder just to be alive.
I wonder too, if my dead father and dead mother are back here and if they
think of me ― even though I don’t know their new names …
in his new life my father can be found in the village coffee shop;
my mother, in a convent, somewhere …
Am I that clock whose insides have been removed slowly over 74 years ― piece
by piece
and am I back here again, looking to Cyprus to put the pieces back?
… the village church bell tolls … I hear it clearly.
A young girl runs past,
in her hand ― a bird cage:
its tiny wire door ― flapping
the wind mutters in Cypriot dialect …
the martyred dead are everywhere
their reign threatens to tip the island to one side. They hold tight to their
designation as myth and refuse to become history… such a weight of guilt, so
many grudges… resentment and betrayals which have hardened and weigh the
island down…
The island has always been the small change in some superpower’s pocket:
the Assyrians became the Egyptians, who became the Persians, who became
the Greeks; then the Romans, the Arabs, the French and the Venetians who
became the Ottomans who became the British, who became the Turks …
a chew toy for imperial ambitions
― but historians are useless in Cyprus because their voice is drowned in the
flood of eyewitnesses
who are always primed to re-enact the islands cruelest past
EPILOGUE –
LARNACA – The same Monday in April – 8:01 am
Cyprus has always tried to shake things off
like Greece it seems as if the thing people won’t let go of is their own good
reflection in the mirror …
meanwhile the island limps into the Mediterranean on 2 wounded legs.
Heaven help it if gas and oil fields become a reality …
it’s been the sea ― not the land ― which has determined what this place is … ,
its true story is told by water.
The April sun rises over the dry hills ― the island strains at its moorings ― as
it responds instinctively to the call from the East.
I look up from reading Report To Greco … there he is ― my father – at the front
door of his mother’s house ― maybe it’s just his voice or his eyes behind my
eyes… but he’s here to tell me how right he was about the village… how right
it was for him to die here ― he opens his arms; I walk towards him; the
cicadas are loudly predicting the rain which never comes … both of us feel an
unnamed wind crossing the village
we hold each other in a motionless dance ―
this is how we find our footing
― our balance.
I’ve wanted to write something which began and ended at the sea … as the
poet said Who can look at blue and not believe?
and in between?
… salvage, salvage and salvage some more.
The mapping’s done.
The route set.
The distances confirmed.
The time verified.
It’s happened in the blink of an eye
(though my legs and arms still stick out from the dream)
and my dreaming came into some real backbone on the way …
Anyway, it’s just a story now
and I know other stories will write themselves over this one
but I feel good knowing the dead have been awake and attentive through this.
Does making this journey put an end to some of the fear? Yes…
for a bit.
Now it’s done the reasons for wanting it so badly begin falling apart ―
tissue paper in water.
What did it take … just closed my eyes and ―
I know now
that in the blink of an eye I could be There … or … Here.
So what is a homeland ― perhaps nothing more than a Rorschach blot ― in
the shape of a country…
or an idea which desolves like sugar.
I reset my heart …
no more bargains to strike ―
but I’d like to figure out whether I fell forward
or if I fell backwards.
Move on now, to the beginning of what comes next;
… later, it will rain.
