Trisagion (Thrice Holy)

1

Tiresias the seer comes towards me,
stands in sun-faded red flowered dress
transparent bag stuffed
with gleanings of street and shore.
He holds out a present of driftwood
bleached and salty, entwined like albino snakes.
Tells me what the birds have said today
in couplets I cannot understand:
reclaiming this temple mound from saint and sinner
he dances off.

2.
In the Cafe Caryatids an old man rests,
blue painted chair tilted in the doorway.
He sat there yesterday, will be there tomorrow.
Teeth and pullover holed and brown, he stares
mute at the road, a drone of tourists passing.
Bacchants and satyrs, they follow the unbrella thyrsos
snake through cafe chairs and shop front T-shirts,
short-stepping in rhythym after a guide; yellow tights,
black ankle boots, she is a queen,
finding honey in the columns and slabs
littering the temple site of Apollo; the residue,
a carved henge, faces westwards, leads nowhere
now, admits to nothing; a lizard's eye
unblinking red, through which
shutters click and cameras flash; the moment
when light folds into darkness remaining elusive.

3.
The kouros at Apollonas reclines obtuse against the hillside,
breathes out asphodels in wave froth to the edge of the cliff.
Tourists climb and slither in search of the shot
to validate memory's convivial hyperbole.
Unrealised Dionysus, a marble moraine,
a black smudge against the darker quarry wall,
suffers them; but dreams of standing free of this rock umbilical-
the headland a plinth, floating between sea and bluer sky,
his arms raised in welcome to sail and oar.

When the gods went villagers dropped hammers,
stopped chipping against the hard grain,
returned to their goats and groves - their piss-poor soil.
Those terraces, tribal scars cut into the mountain sides,
in turn, abandoned for easier fleeces each Summer boat
disgorged; a new mythology of excess is today's orthodoxy.
Dionysus, be content to lie weeping ferns into the pockmark pools

Feeding The Cat

Two of my poems have been included in the Cinnamon Press anthology Feeding The Cat which has just been published. They are The East Yorkshire Crematorium - which is mentioned in an earlier post - and a long poem in three parts caled Trisagion. In Greek that means Thrice Holy and is part of an Orthodox liturgy. The poem was written on the island of Naxos in the Cyclades and works with the idea of the ancient sites carrying a residue of the old religion which has been overlayed by Orthodox Christianity and now has a religion of sun seekers and tourists on top of that. Probably doesn't work but Naxos is a great place to sit and write ! I'll post Trisagion when I can find it on my PC !