Greece and Poems

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.