Greece

[Xamonas Chegwe]

I've spent a lot of years working in and around Greece. These are a few impressions that I stuck together into a poem. I hope you like it.


Greece

Sun faded land.

Bleached hills and washed-out beaches,
Under August’s yellow glare;
Dry pines and eucalyptus,
Compete in windless stillness;
And all around the darkest blue;
The bluest, darkest ground,
Within which to frame,
The white, white ships.

Patched roads shine with heat;
As coughing trucks climb the bends,
Tired dogs, tongues lolling, watch,
Uncaring; too hot to chase;
A tortoise drags it’s carapace,
One slow foot follows another,
Through careful traffic;
(Hurry is alien)
The same cars swerve to hit the snakes,
They must be quicker (most are),
Natural selection in action;
And still the sun bleeds down,
(Wars here are fought in winter).

Great domes rise from the plain,
Sides pleated with dry streams;
The tear-tracks of spring and autumn rains;
Cyclamens bud beneath needles,
Awaiting those same rains,
To show themselves to eager bees.

Spots, dots, commas and curves,
Scrawled across the Aegean;
Where John revealed,
Drunken foreigners revel;
Where the colossus strode,
A cat sits in every spot,
That can hold a cat;
And on every whitewashed step,
A black-weeded widow sits and spits.

And tonight, as so many nights before,
I walk the blocks of parked cars,
My quest (so mundane in this land of Odysseus),
To find a DVD unseen.

[Riesa]

Those are impressions? God, what beautiful language. I love the parentheses. And the final four lines, they remind me of myself, looking for burritos in Rio. It's lovely.

[Doctor Boogaloo]

Xamonas, I enjoyed your poem. If I were an editor, there'd be a cheque in the mail. (I might ask you to shave a comma or two, but I would not insist.)
I especially like the the penultimate stanza. Very nice indeed.
Cheers.

[Xamonas Chegwe]

Thank you both. You're too generous.

I must confess Doc, that I'm following the 'rules' of poetic punctuation that i was taught back in school. I'm not sure why, because I'm not rhyming, or bothering too much with meter or anything, just looking for the right words to express the things I want to show. I may be less strict in my next outing. Thanks for pointing that out.

And Riesa, I hope you found your burritos. ;)

[jon1jt]

Just to repeat what's been said above and add, very vivid imagery, lovely use of words, a transport to "being there." My favorite lines:

And on every whitewashed step,
A black-weeded widow sits and spits.

[genoveva]

Spots, dots, commas and curves,
Scrawled across the Aegean;
[/i]

Thanks for the insight to Greece!

I especially like the above two lines.
But, I have to say, the last two lines left me dissapointed! :eek: :confused:

[Xamonas Chegwe]

Coming to Greece with visions of epic poems, gods and heroes, you would probably find the mundanity of the reality a trifle disappointing too. Perhaps that was what I was trying to convey in those last 2 lines; perhaps not. I'm not saying - it speaks for itself as it will, or it doesn't.

Someone posted something in this forum recently that was very similar to the lines you quoted. I am now unsure whether I had seen that quote before and subconsciously mirrored it, or whether it really came from me - that's the trouble with words, there's only so many ways that you can put them together. I can only state that it definitely wasn't deliberate plagiarism, if at all. I prefer to think that the metaphor is just a very obvious one; look at a map of Greece and you'll see what I mean. And as they say: "Great minds think alike and fools rarely differ."