Phemonoe
What they didn’t understand enchanted them the most,
especially if it didn’t refer to them — those general and
vague that relieved them from most of the difficulties —
those words that hid and referred to one of their locales
(barren and unknown lands),
a place of quietness and freedom.
The priestess Phemonoe
(it was said) understood the bird chirps, the water trickle,
the stirring of leaves, and after she’d drink three gulps from
the spring of Cassotis*, and after she’d sit on the high tripod,
she explained them (with inarticulate cries) and holding in
her mouth a laurel branch.
The prophets, around her, wrote
down her cries hastily. After, the decipherers explained, with
clearness and exactness, the exegesis of her words.
Until, one day,
they showed her the written exegesis of her cries, Phemonoe
couldn’t understand them “who said these?” she asked.
And when, “You” they said to her, she smiled ambiguously
and added: “Yes, but I meant something else too”
This “something else too” fifty years later (or even eons) none
of our decipherers has explained, and perhaps for this reason
the poets still continue to write with the secret suspicion that
even Phemonoe doesn’t know what that else is.

• Naiad who lived in the spring at the Temple of Apollo at Delphi.

https://www.amazon.com/dp/B0F9X3VPN4

II
Eros caresses the ephebe’s heart as the Muses
sing delights to the senses and an ethereal
conscience suffuses under the citadel
of Athena, where thoughts create a man
and infinite splendor spreads over every
pleat of the insignificant, and in which
the lyre fills the air with its diaphanous
euphony. The dark blue Aegean is in consonance
with Eros when the freest mind
succumbs to the freeing poison as
the glaucous sky sheds tears and the
agile goat climbs the rocks licking the salt
of its sweat. The body is hardened like
a stone. The crest of the eastern sky
shivers from the taste of blood
as under the shining marbles
the furies unleash macabre lamentations
and the vision of an analytical mind ascends.

https://www.amazon.com/dp/0978186583

excerpt

Smiling from one side of his mouth to the other George
placed the plate on their table.
“Are you on duty this morning, Mary?” George asked her.
“No, not today,” she answered.
“Why don’t you go to the personnel eating room?” George
wondered aloud.
“I don’t like eating there, besides I never craved the full
breakfast…”
“I see,” George added and left them alone; he knew they
liked that.
Sister Helen and Father Peter appeared guiding the kids
in for their porridge. They all followed their lines and took their
seats, boys in one side of the eating area and girls on the other.
The livingness of the kids waked up the place and suddenly
everything seemed to make some sense, the tables, the benches,
the kitchen counters were the food was placed, the walls which
tuned their ears to grab whispers and soft words spoken between
the little savages against the stern voices of their two supervisors
who kept on saying, “quiet, quiet, take your food and sit down”
while they paced from one side of the hallway to the other perusing
both sides, make sure no one of these kids did anything that
they would disapprove.
Suddenly in all quietness a upheaval that broke the utter
silence, Marcus, who else would do such a thing, as he was horsing
around in his place he pushed the boy next to him with the
result of some porridge spilled on the table. The boy started
making a commotion, Father Peter rushed to their area and
ordered Marcus to get up take his bowl with his porridge and
step on the hallway, which the youth did, as always but soon as
he stepped in the open area between the two rows of benches a
hard slap from the hand of the priest struck the back of his neck;

https://www.amazon.com/dp/1926763602

excerpt

The circulating nurse in Theatre Three opened a package of suture
material and dropped the sterile contents onto Tyne’s scrub table.
“Better hurry, Tyne, Doctor Bentall is already scrubbing up. And he
has an intern with him, so you’ll probably have to hold the new boy’s
hand as well as Doctor Bentall’s.”
“Oh, Marjory, no one has to hold Doctor Bentall’s hand.” Tyne
chuckled as she secured the suture needle onto a holder.
“Maybe not, darn it. But a lot of us would like to, eh?” Marjory
Andrews’ eyes sparkled above her gauze mask as she opened a sterile
pack of sponges and handed them to Tyne.
“Not me,” Tyne said.
“Oh no, of course not you. You’re too wrapped up in that farmer
boy back in … where is it? Emblem?”
Tyne felt the colour rise in her cheeks, and was thankful for the
mask that covered most of her face. Pain stabbed at her chest, a pain
she had experienced daily since graduation night. Only during working
hours could she exorcise the ghosts that plagued her with every
thought of Morley. And now, Marjory had to remind her – right at
the start of a major scrub. But the circulating nurse could not know
about the break-up. Only Moe was privy to that information.
Tyne took a pack of abdominal sponges from Marjory. “Okay, let’s
do the count,” she said briskly, putting an end to the frivolous talk.
For the next few hours all the concentration of the two nurses, as
well as that of the student nurse who would soon be joining Tyne at
the scrub table, would be centred on the patient, the surgeon and the
procedure upon which he was about to embark.

https://www.amazon.com/dp/1926763068

Methodical
He kept his dreams
ambitiously hidden in his heart
he placed hope in monotony
in a separate crystalline vase and
at the time of the shortest
shadows he walked
to the shore to breathed in
all he could of the endless blue
and after on his irises he painted
the beautiful little cove
the houses, the gleaming,
whitewashed chapel
he blessed them all
with the aroma of oregano
he changed his clothes and
tightly in his palm, he kept
a shiny coin for the lone
ferryman who would take him across.
https://www.amazon.com/dp/1926763750

Escape

He sat on the stool by the front yard; his hands, so clumsy, had already overtaken us “someday they will demolish the house” he says to me “and they’ll discover it.”
And every so often, at the far end of the room, someone wrapped a bed-sheet around himself; it was the time he escaped until
the bed-sheet fell empty on the floor and we had a friend forever.
In the stations the immigrants were lined and, hiding inside their
their overcoats, they waited for the voyage like a dog on its death bed.
And uncle Elias, our rich relative, years after his death, still stood on the sidewalk; however he didn’t turn to look at us, “uncle” I said “since you knew, why you came back?”, “I can’t fall asleep” he says to me “I still have to lose some more.”
I tried to leave but I met the deaf boy on the side street; he was leaning on the wall and he was crying and now there was a small lit chapel on the wall while snow fell outside and passersby drowned in their words.

https://www.amazon.com/dp/B087367R7C

Microscope-Telescope
Rotten old age and dust
ministers the gothic room of Faust
in the lilies a bite of dew
studies the galaxy’s litany
beyond the flow of the Ocean
a planet dies
as if a pomegranate bursts

https://www.amazon.com/dp/1926763408

The Unlearned
The yearning of man to exist somewhere else
detecting the paths of his death
he discovers
a complex soul with many bottoms
the labyrinth he seeks transcends him
light refracts and detaches
in its primeval conviction
as I keep away from the roaring eons
I want to be near something that stirs in silence
for this, tonight,
I’ll read to you about the stars
old hand-writings of eternity
shepherds of ancient meanings that widen
the warmth of wisdom
a wanderer trapped in the enigma
I know
nothing is content
only approaches to the unlearned
between life and death

https://www.amazon.com/dp/B0DPCRLJC6