At the top of the village, at the top of the day,
the caldera below is a cooling skillet in the sinking sun.
In Agios Charalambos a white-robed priest flits
between ikons, lighting the lamps.

Each gutter and flare of candle flame
reveals miracles performed anew:
hollow-eyed and churlish a corpse is raised to a second chance,
a dragon flinches before Agios Georgio’s sword.
Between lectern and ikonostasis,
word and flesh,
the priest chants this joyful mourning of the dying day
eleison…eleison…eleison…

He looks at me, narrow-eyed and questing;
“Catholiki”, I mouth, as if this explains anything
about our shared presence here; we are
priest, chanters and people together.
Call and response have elided, have become one
under the painted gaze of long dead bishops and saints

A single bell chimes, the so und palpable,
a measuring–rod for the space between silences.
My steps echo its rhythm into the yard,
down the cobbled slope to the village;
For the congregation below the day is ending
in bars and tavernas,
in hopes of wonders to be worked
before next day break.

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 saints and sinners,
he dances off.

2
In the Café Caryatids an old man rests,
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 umbrella thyrsos
snake through café chairs
and shop front T-shirts,
short-stepping in rhythm 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 resid ue, 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 remains 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,
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.

You can’t see the looky-looky men;
they are translucent, a slight
disturbance of light at table edge,
through which the bay can still be seen.

Shadow figures on clockwork rounds,
they flip-flop ceaselessly around tourist
cafes and beaches like waves rolling in from
Africa to break against a barren shore.

Wound up in some warehouse, circuited,
set off, staggered; each convinced they will
sell something – blinkered to the one a few
tables on, the one a few tables behind.

Specialists in cheap tat – headband
torches, fake DVDs, plastic souvenirs
that glow malevolently green in the dark –
their black faces take on a grave mien.

These men speak but are not heard;
“good stuff, looky looky, give best price”.
Knock off Prada, Chanel, Vuitton hang off
arms and neck dragging down like shackles.

Thousand yard stares quarantine them; they
learn a thousand ways of saying no. Still,
pour another glass of wine, fork the Caesar
salad, admire the view from the terrace.

© Patrick Lodge
© Santorini Caldera, photo by Josh Trefethen

bio

As Odysseus traveled, the world
got darker
all along the path of his eclipse
evening deepened
left in tatters all the worse
his warrior’s heart was broken.

No longer beating for war
he dreamed of Penelope, Telemachus
his only son
his words unstrung, his ship and crew
destroyed
he wandered the Aegean like a swallow
off its course.

Looking for stars to guide him
his bribed, borrowed and battered crew
cut loose
across the Ionian sea with a new moon
to mark this verse.
Come stay awhile to hear my sorrow.

Except for war Odysseus would be home
no more ambrosia, no more Circe
no more siren-song,or the giant Cyclops
not on the rocks, just a memory
meandering his way home to Ithaca.

The birds no longer sang
their Mixolydian melodies, depressed
at so many ill omens, prophecy
that filled him with dread
a penumbra filled his head
craving,his heart ached.

In this twilight, he waxed and waned
the beard that weighed him down
his hair filled with eels,
eyes always staring ahead
toward a flat-screen horizon.

On a Greek Island floating
in the Saronic gulf
the hydra-headed monster
has been replaced by windmills
and the donkeys bray to us at sunrise.

Tourists swim like sea-turtles,
sunning themselves naked
on the rocks while below
the white walls of Hydra tell us
we have all been lost.

Bouginavillea follows us
flourish of the slipper parade at dusk,
dolphins, lovers of Zeus
sport in the sea, banished
long ago by Hera.

While grey-eyed Pallas Athena still
watches, patron of Athens to keep
us from falling overboard as we ride
on the Flying Dolphin.

I’ve come here wanting to drift
across the Peloponnesus
no does to write, no loom to mend,
so I’m not ready to be found out yet.
Still looking for a few good goddesses.

I sit in my seaweed chair
looking out the window
daydreaming about Circe,
my lost shipmates, the Cyclops.

Since I have slain the suitors
Penelope won’t speak to me,
my loyal dog died of happiness
and Telemachus has gone back to Rodos.

While I sleep deep in my cups
wish only for Lethe or Crete.
I am no longer seasick.
I dream creme-de-menthe.

My clothes tumble dry
in the sunlight. I long for
another journey. With my webbed
hands I close this book.

*

© Michael Magee
Photo ©Stratos Fountoulis “A stadium stroll”, Athens, 2011

It’s my problem, not yours.
I’d hate to be the cause
of a dispute, or a row.

«What a cow!»
I can hear you cry,
but why
me?

I’m thinking,
sinking
in my own thoughts-again;

of men,
of the unobtainable,
inconceivable.

Unbelievable,

the audacity!
My own dignity
is at stake.

My imagination
keeps me awake
with reveries
of him
and me-
which will ever be.

Unless…

No, wait that’s just
Wrong. On
oh
So
Many
Levels.

But I’d revel,
In your company,
In your arms

Like she does
Like she can
and will do.

So, it’s my problem,
not yours.
Take your smiling eyes of blue,

unaware that you,
are the cause of my wandering mind.
I’m sure I’ll find, someone like you

But not you…ever.

She graces the waves,
The currents, the cliff-edge
And the gorge.

The sun gleams down
on her glistening skin
and her fin.

Her hair, flaxen, and flaccid
Rolls down
Her torso,

Sweeps and swathes
As she bathes and
Basks in the embracing sun.

No feet, but fin
to glide her in
to the water before her.

Her song, a toxic yet saintly serenade:
from the heart
mesmerizes all within range:

Beyond her, the horizon,
The blood-stained skies
And gulls fleeing,

screeching warning cries.
On her rocks,
Reeling in the unsuspecting
Sailors .

Her voice is a weapon,
A sultry sweet haven
For them to be entranced in
It’s a risk they take without thinking

Transfixed, they see her, without blinking
singing baiting, preening and waiting
unaware of the web which she is spinning.

The men and their boats, crashing into the rocks,
Steered by their cocks and can’t believe the cataclysm ahead.

Why couldn’t they steer away instead?
Instead to their death, from one stone to another,

They’ll die together as the crew whose curiosity grew, the closer they gained to the siren on the rock of grey-blue.

For whomever dares sail on the river of the Rhein , they too should be warned of their fate in due time,

Should they hear a honey voice
calling them nigh,
Be cautious,

be careful
it may be the Siren of the Rhein;
the lovely Lorelei.

©Laura Cracknell
Photo© Stratos Fountoulis «Druivenfestival Hoeilaart, 2012»

I ALWAYS SEEM TO WATCH YOU FROM AFAR

On evening where sheets of rooks whirl
like cyclones of flapping ash,
through the dark afternoon window
where I see the shell of a blue star.
I watch you from afar

time beating like an impatient monster in motion,
our day became fitted hours of paid banality,
yet I always seem to watch you leave but never
arrive.

When I heard the wind carry its voice
from cordial gutter to napkin fields of snow,
where horses ran in triangles of untouched lavender
did I see an image of you walking away.

If I could stop time and its deathly ruin
and pause just an hour in your arms
I would see the true wonderment in love
its necessities and beauty in flourishing threads of time.

Yet I always seem to watch you from afar
either leaving or sleeping beside me deep in dream,
passing me in the hallway at night
like a familiar stranger on a returning train.

*

NOTES ON MEETING MY YOUNGER SELF

I watched him without interruption
my naïve and arrogant imitator,
a lying master to all assumptions
you see that boy I’m now his narrator.
I saw smudged swans drift in a river
with familiar figures I’d almost forgot,
wanting to question them before time withers
and fading seconds of youth stop.
Yet these cobbled streets held my memory
like a dark star holds the canvas to our sky,
when once best friends became the enemy
the boy started to look through a man’s eyes.

© Matthew J. Duggan
photo©Stratos Fountoulis

*

bio
Matthew J. Duggan has published in many poetry magazines such as Dwang 2, Seventh Quarry, Carillon, Monkey Kettle, Littoral press, Chimera, Magpie’s Nest, The Ugly Tree, Connections, Square (On a CD ), M:/P Mag, Krax, and many more.

Behead me for I am a fool
in love with the red dance
of your lithe shadow,
torture me for I am an idiot
dressed in the rags of hope,
stone me for the anguished
emptiness I cry out in,
as you pass deliberately dagger
eyed and gimlet mouthed by the
open door of your home.

I would be beaten and flayed than
never know your smile, fall in
dung and be refused ablution
than never hear your singing voice
in my kitchen.

At night, visions of you haunt my
dreams, your tapered fingers
reaching for mine as I stumble beneath the
cold starless sky.
You lead me gently to your hearth fires,
offer tea , treat me as an honoured
guest and in my heaving bosom thankful
tears drown me in famished desire.

Then I awake and even this is torn,
even this silken kiss of skin snatched
from my aspiring and I awaken to the
black truth once more. I am bereft of even
this self-deceit, this contemptuous trickery
of my maddened mind and feel the loneliness
of the moon kissed lunatic.

Send them my cold distant love, send your
father and brothers, send them with sticks
flails and whips to beat me from your door,
your pure modesty demands it , your family’s
good name insists that your love must be
denied. Send them and not your snatched
backward glances.
End my living in this hell.

I’m sick of this charade, this theatre of
puppets living my life as if I have no curiosity,
where turning over a rock to find reason crawling
there is like dropping a wet fart in an elevator
full of Imams.

I am sick of having some big fat invisible hand up
my pained backside and it moving my tongue
with its index of revealed truths, I’m tired of it closing
my eyes making me recite the Victory march to oblivion
like an upturned porcelain doll hopping
to the sound of the Ottoman kettle drums.

Damn it I am nauseous with the taste of my
own sense of shame, as it washes around my
throat like an invented wine made of crushed
bones and silicon. I cannot go on playing this
game for special children of; “see it now forget
it.”

I cleaned my hands five times today plus three
to eat. I closed the doors and locked them four
times as I bent to sound of big Bird croaking in
his nest. But by my beard and my toenails I can’t
switch off the gas any more than I have already and
the scruples are ringing like bells in my blocked ears.

Please.

If I hear you say once more – keep walking, keep
talking that hedge witch wisdom of the forest – then
I swear I’m gonna bite my own fingers off during lent
and send you the doctors bill.

“Hush now child”, just will not do anymore.
Nor will “Hold your questions”, because over the
rainbow there’s a sweet little gift where you
can pull your blue jeans on and go riding with
David Dundas and Cat Stevens as a lithe young
man once again growing his third set of teeth.

It’s time old man to get this straight – culture is not enough.
of a reason to keep believing these scary stories. I’m playing
no more games of donkey, chasing Nassrudin’s celestial carrots
anymore. I’m cutting the barbed wire of faith wrapped
around my heart. I am demolishing the Berlin wall in my mind
shooting the Ceausescu’s, in my brain because this is the spring
time of my soul.

© Theodoros Ellinas
Photo by Nasiakapa.com 

bio
Theodoros Ellinas, was born in 1957 in Camden London to a couple from Cyprus who moved there in the 50’s. He grew up in Liverpool and moved to Cyprus for three years in 1967. He attended Leeds University where he studied drama and presentation, He declares that: My main influences are my historical and cultural background, existential philosophy, the nature of language and relationships. My most abiding and respected writers are Kurt Vonnegut, Hermann Hesse and Osho. Politically I lean to the left and having been a victim during my youth of the Greek Junta during my education I am also fascinated by the acquisition of prejudices and their effect on life choices. 

Εν αρχή ην ο Λόγος, και ο Λόγος ην προς τον Θεόν, και Θεός ην ο Λόγος

Google it!
‘Cause it’s a poem about Words
Or a Word.
Grab a Merriam
Grab anything you have!
Or you may simple ignore the sources
And divine the meaning instead!
You will find, what you shall know already!

In the music, in the murder
In the euphoria, in the eulogy
In the grand and in the grain,
There are words.
Everything is words in disguise.
The woman you see in the street,
For the mathematical dysfunction of moments,
Or for a prophetic pattern in numbers,
Is only a beautiful ‘word’,
Or perhaps only a melodious echo and equation in the mind
Of the word ‘beautiful’,
That solves all the perplexities of so simple a sensation
So simple that it’s almost unexpected.
The sudden encounter has no meaning
Only the face is meaningful, ‘cause it’s a word
And you have just rehearsed your vocabulary
And have turned ‘one word wise’.
Or the dog you see in the alley
And suddenly feel like fleeing away from it,
Is a word, or maybe two words (but words!)-
‘Teeth’ and ‘bark’. You feel like a cat.
‘Fear’- the word, is your puffy tail,
And ‘run’ is your action of folly.
Whatever, the trees are also full of them,
And a tree is one word, a verbose of leafy alphabets.
It sheds letters in autumn days,
And the poets merely pick them up
And press them inside the leaves of books.
Also the buildings, we live inside words,
And if you climb the storeys quietly you will see
The bricks have piled up into a different story
From the one you just left, or the one you will leave.
It’s up to you whether you like wandering or not,
But if you are unwilling to read the bricks
The corners, the stairs, the skylights and the shadows,
Probably you will have a favourite word,
Or only a bunch of them.
Probably you will say the same thing in all the seminars!
Like this, this world is the draft of an epic written by a fine poet.
That’s why if you simply rephrase a story
Which alone is not that bad,
Work on it a bit, galvanize, equate,
You may even come up with a conclusive story of your own
And call it your own epic!
You may even decipher all the encrypted stories
Some written in crumbled papers thrown away in the streets
Or in the basket- the vestibule for the unwanted.
And if you are so good at it, in rephrasing
And, well, in masterful plagiarizing,
If you have read a lot of these words in disguise
With the details- all the alphabets and then the stories,
Who knows, you may even find the poet,
Who hides behind these words,
Who too is a word,
Was a word in the beginning.
And some say- will be just a word in the end!

*

In the beginning of the end of light
It was quite a prosaic and dull encounter:
In the three-wheeler me revising the synopsis of the day
(Not remembering the beginning, neither the complication
Nor the denouement, not even where I was and why I was
There where I was then!)
Planning a plain dinner with boiled rice and fish
And after that a porn perhaps, or a movie
Or some episodes from the sitcom I watch for fun
And after that some light snacks I feast upon for fun
And after that some yawns- prelude to no sleep
And after that a dose of dream, injected forcefully
Into the rebellious Insomnia. (for fun?)
It wasn’t in my plan, not for that moment it was meant.
My plan was simple, unpoetic, without any songlike ceremony
And my entire forgotten day wasn’t supposed to lead to that!
(I wasn’t ready for anything but for some idle fun!
That I deserved for saving the world by doing nothing!)
I was just looking at things without seeing anything
And then, some of a sudden, an image
Acted upon itself quietly, but obviously in some artistic frenzy;
Appeared at my brief appearance at that spot
Out from some empty corner of the street.
It was bizarre, absolutely odd and quite a view:
Sitting under some lonely lamp-post
A painter, long-haired and shabby,
By artfully scratching his paper with a pen
Was trying to squeeze some fun out of a skinny beggar
Whose tiny figure lied completely shrouded in some black.
One can easily tell from the way the bum slept
That the shroud wasn’t unfriendly to the chill of the night. . .

The three-wheels of the wheeler
Didn’t stop to enjoy the show
And so was I back to my revision.
But then, like in some less divine apostasy
I even forgot what I couldn’t remember!
And in mind travelled back some five or ten seconds
To sit behind the painter who sat behind an idea,
To watch him watching the bum carefully
And dig a dark story out from his ink.
Just for a few unwatched seconds
The feeling filled me with a lost joy,
Moistened my dried well of poetic passion
And then again became what it was prosaically before-
Just a bizarre image acting upon itself to become
An image for an idle eye.
Then why, why the beggar’s black shroud
Transforming into the night
Is shrouding me tonight now in some dark chill?
Why questions are seeking answers through me
“What beauty did he seek in the otherwise ugly sleeping man?
Where’s the climactic calamity
That gives birth to the silent darkness?”

I had some plans for fun
But with their premature death
And now me sitting before an idea
How can I endure looking at nothing and seeing only that-
The wheels, the beggar and the painter
And seek beauty there to witness
The birthnight of an unwanted poem?

©Hisham M Nazer 
Photo: Creative Commons

bio
Hisham M Nazer is a trilingual poet. A T. S. Eliot scholar, currently working on a dissertation on T. S. Eliot and Dante, supervised by the department of English, University of Rajshahi. A prolific writer, published in several national magazines and international anthologies. He is an essayist too, a spiritual speaker and a teacher of philosophy. Worked as a sub-editor for two literary magazines- Shasshwatiki (Bengali, Bangladesh) and The Browsing Corner (Multi-lingual e-zine, India).