August 29th
(Commemoration of the Beheading of Saint John the Baptist)
A strict fast day, going by the book.
After the Liturgy the village square
glares heat from every cobble. The light
crushes. We cower inside the kafeneion,
under the creaking fan.
Outside,huddled
in black from head to slippered foot
she leans against the well-head wall
under the fig tree’s shade.
The priest’s wife tells us
‘She does things properly, that one.
Nothing will pass her lips today
not even water.’
The well is dry – the sweet Taygetos water
purloined by the tourist coast.
(In the derelict public garden across the square
a plastic bowser holds the village’s supply
tepid in the sun.)
‘I’m a hundred and one, you know.
I was born in that house there’
The shell without roof, the vacant window
spaces gape onto the square.
‘You have a beautiful church here, Lady.’
‘Yes? You should have seen it before –
when I was young, then it was beautiful.
Now, it is all _____’ My scant Greek
loses its hold. The lament becomes rhythmic
- all I catch is the refrain:
Pou einai…? Pou einai…? Pou einai…?
Where are what? The reflections in her
girlhood eyesof young men dancing?
Brothers and cousins gone to war,
and not returned – or if returned
not who they were? The busyness under
her window as the world came and went
through a living village?
Or was she in her day
the local funeral weeper, wailing still
the generations of her Maniat dead,
squandered across this unforgiving
landscape:
Where is the bridge that one might cross
into the world below?
Where are the young who sit and wait in
silence?
Where are the old, and where the little
children?
How do they fare without their mothers?
Or does she perhaps, now she is as
ready
as she will ever be, rehearse
her funeral canon:
Where is the desire of the world?
Where the imaginings of ephemeral
creatures?
Where are the gold and the silver?
Where is the multitude of servants and
of noise?
All are dust, all ashes, all a shadow.
Where is the beauty of the body? Where
is youth?
Where are the eyes, and where the
bodily form?
All like grass have withered, all have
perished.
The beauty of the countenance is
mouldered
and Death has withered all the flower of
youth.
Her voice fades, falters. Unmoving, she
withdraws
into who knows what unreachable moment
of her turbulent century
And still, Lady, at a hundred and one
you do things properly.
The water you drew to offer us today
came from a deep well.
Martin Olsson - October 2014
INSIDE the MANI 68