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Mother Poems

Greek Island Poetry
 

KALYMNOS

Skevos

Tell me!
It is a joy to know
the thoughts of another
as though they were perfume
shared by lovers.

The words of spoken language
are delicious even stammered,
when the listener is eager
and the speaker is willing -

but my father, a scholar,
fled his country
rather than teach Homer
in despotic Italian.

He is dead now, with his brother
the philologist, who worked with him
in the orange groves when he returned;
and the valley is a only a shadow for me now.

Still, I do know of a place...
And we drove blindly through the narrow
wall-canyons of Vathi
to the house of a tiny woman in black.

Look! I have brought a friend,
he exclaims, and he wades through her backyard
as she kisses my cheeks - he is already cradling
two full armloads of ripe mandarins in his shirt.

All that fragrance he drops in my lap,
stuffs one rich fruit in my mouth, and when
I glow with pleasure, he crowns them
with a handful of blue-flowered rosemary.

For days, back in Leros, the intense golden light
hovers over my blue bowl, the aroma
of joy fills my nostrils, and I seek yet
another language to fathom their radiance.

© Dorothy Koval
 

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