Normally when I travel I am under the delusion that somehow I will be "inspired" to write about new experiences. I'm always motivated to do so, but generally no poems materialize. In April, however, we Maya, Brian, Lora and I visited Greece - Athens, Santorini and Crete) - and upon my return, I really did begin to write. I did not get very far on some of the poems, but these two I did manage to finish. While they are too amateurish for a literary magazine, I thought they still might find a home in this family blog.
At Akroteri Lighthouse
My daughter and I spider down the rocks
where wind-aged lava and the scent of the Aegean
bind us more strongly than any words possible.
Wedged in the boulders’ crevices I discover
a fragment of blue enameled pottery
perhaps a scrap of long ago Thera coughed up
reminding us that
then, as now (the surviving
murals tell us)
young women bore hope in flowers
and fathers sacrificed to family
gods
for their future.
But for all their prayers
the lava still came.
No bodies found.
Perhaps they escaped to these rocks
the westernmost part of the island
ships bearing them off.
It may even be that the destruction
was what they prayed for
the unchosen chance to leave behind
lives more fissured than the volcano.
We descend to the beach now
where the sea pounds these rocks down
into red and black sand
the way time pounds all dreams down
into the sediment of daily life,
fragments that only sparkle
when seen from a distance.
***
Idyll
Davos and Mythos beer in a
bright Chania sunlight
whose lightness seems to
rise
above the ordinary day.
Aeolus blowing in takes us away
from reality for a while
to seas where Nereids still swim
shores where centaurs and satyrs bathe.
How good it is to float
above logic for a while to
not be circumscribed by
reasons rules or science’s
invisible chains.
Now even dreams are logical
dampened into a half life of decay
but the ocean is lapis lazuli today
and we are, after all on an island
where the blue fans out as far
as we can see.
Maybe we are after all just sparks
Ein sof trapped in matter’s labyrinth
waiting for that shift the frees us home.
I welcome any comments.
