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MOONBIRDS AND WILD WATER
Poems from Greece
SANTORINI
See the small men;
smug beetles on your broken back.
Diverted by the day,
while the beast within the bay
lies mockingly, shockingly black.
The beetle men scurry;
cocksure of nature’s status quo;
the fish, the vine,
the nameless undertow,
the beast that keeps its senses primed
and sprawls; unmonitored, unknown;
feeling for the time of rude release.
Like intermediaries, the planes pass overhead,
extracting fleeting vestiges of fear
among the beetle men.
The beast in the Caldera bides its time,
as the demon within man; as darkly devious,
runs a crass, competing course
in the bright deception of the sun.
ON LESBOS
The sea waits.
Are you watching between Venus and the Moon?
Come soon.
I wait.
I am so far away. A day.
Come soon.
I hear you in the wind.
I see you in the sea.
The lake-lapped creatures wait.
Life here is lovely
but comes late.
“Why are we here?” you asked,
while seeing in the sea, infinity,
and knowing its bright light of life
dissolves into the distant death of sky.
How dare death come so soon?
Thieving flesh and blind belief;
the fickle son of need.
This is no sea, but symbol of
life lived, loved;
Mirror of our unfathomed fears,
possessing the planet in tears.
SKIATHOS
Moonbirds singing in Skiathos
beneath a moon that pulls a pewter sea.
Moonbirds in cloistered Koukounaries
and wind-washed trees conniving with the birds
beneath the moon.
Trees darken; a metaphor for shadows
on the fractious face of man.
The Moonbirds - a poetic parody - persist
with tuneful territorial claims,
while, to the north,
The birds really did sing all night in Skiathos.
THE CATS OF KOS
Cats come, cats go.
Most we don’t know,
like the cats of Kos.
The thin cat clan that gets what it can,
while the fat cat kingdom demands its due.
Some thin cats moved, grew fat
and forgot the cats that were left on Kos.
The fat cats in Europe came and went,
their money hard-earned
and swiftly spent.
Some swaggered back to the island of Kos
to find thin cats watching,
waiting, stock still.
Primed in silence for the kill.
THE LIBERTINE
The sea silk washes as she dives;
a woman with the freedom of a fish.
The sun strikes from her iridescent scales
rare water gems that vanish into air.
She feels the sea's profundity, the binding of wild weed,
the curiosity of fish that brush and dart.
The seventh wave. Poseidon probes - audacious and sublime;
a libertine whose foam bears her to bliss.
She is carried, satiated to the sand;
Struck now by sun; Aegean savagery and silk.
Her fingers filter glittering grains
that float and spread in coalescing clouds,
then sift in soft suspension
through her elevated void.
INVADERS
The horses came in the night.
White-maned marauders
let loose by the moon.
They roared and fought
but could not reach the shore.
Primed by Poseidon
and pulled up short,
they plunged and protested
through the wind-roaring night
and sun-streaked day.
To calm at last - expended;
unique among invaders to this island
in withdrawing without conquest.
This poem was inspired by the Cretan Sea at Gerani
HANIA
Used, abused, yet lovely still,
she nestles where the heat lies full and fierce.
She barely breathes throughout the lengthening day.
Her layers of life are raw
as spears of sunlight pierce
and prey.
Elegant for Venice, spurned by Turk,
crushed by Nazi fire,
she casts illusions in the lamp-lit night.
futility of flags and feet of clay,
she has relinquished pride and poise and love
and pits the strength of time against decay.
Now in the chilling dews of dawn,
still with broken back, she gives.
She weeps within her decimated stones,
yet struck by stars and washed by wind,
she lives.
MINOTAUR
The beauty of the bull moves
massive among flowers,
drawn by implications of the flesh.
Pasiphae is lost in a dream of secret hours;
the bull a raging river in her veins.
Her bull child roars and grows
deprived of flowers,
locked in a labyrinth of aimless pain.
The Minotaur is maddened by the endlessness of hours;
outrageous dream congealing in his veins.
The anguish of the bull man
withers funeral flowers.
The progeny of dream confronts his death.
A young man moves with malice through the agony of hours.
The woman wrestles devils in the dark.
OMALOS
People of the rock;
resistant as the rock; belligerent
yet bereft.
Bones blossoming with wind-scarred flowers.
People of the peaks and lonely plains.
Giving again and again
the body blow, consigning infiltration
to the dust.
A solitary shepherd listens to the silence of the slopes.
And where intruders failed,
palpably attentive, the peaks diminish
the hobbled men
the hapless men
who nonetheless draw to them
the grandeur of the Gorge.
TEARS
Poseidon’s horses pound the sleeping shore;
foam flies from open mouths,
their manes are melting snow
flung across the breathless beach
to cling in drops like diamonds in the tree.
Gift of the sea god
poised unstrung; a necklet for the tamarisk;
salt tears winking in the savage sun.
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TWO FINAL POEMS
SILICA OF THE SEA
Quartz - pure gift of a graceless sea
whose innocence died with mermaids.
The stones; honed like virgin brides by water-borne excess
stark or mineral-marked with hints of virgin blood.
Crystals - rarest -
like a woman unpossessed;
every nuance dancing in ice-dark chastity.
Amethyst - the lilac lady bringing luck,
defying magic, constant as the moon.
Chalcedony, whose milk blue sensuality
is bound by fairy hairs.
&nbs
p; Babylonian, Persian, Roman, Greek
pursued you on the open market of the shore.
And agate - a body mixed with moss
to breathe illusions of the land
on skin washed clean with salt.
Then gentle rose
speared with six-rayed stars
from a galaxy of lingering light at dawn.
With citrine; warmed by lemon, yellow, gold;
guilelessly for gathering in the sun.
While smoky quartz
drifts through tide and time from monstrous granite growths,
holding hard her secrets
within flame and frozen fire.
SPHINX
Star and sand-swept. Crouched in time;
the Sphinx has raised her profile to the moon.
Soft inclinations flood her woman's face,
then fade,
while her huge wings weighed with flying sand
are sealed, forbidding flight.
Yet in her mind, they move.
And, like a bird, she soars.
She sweeps along the paths of stellar dust
and is borne through whirling winds of birth and death.
But as she touches on the cosmic core,
she falters and drops darkly back to earth.
Her lion's limbs settle bestially in sand;
a sterile antidote to star-struck flight.
She scorns her three identities; beauty, beast and bird;
cruel spawning from the addled mind of man,
whose contradictions flourish unresolved.
He is tethered like the Sphinx
in limitations and dismay.
He casts about his deserts
seeking dreams and forging foolish ways to fly.
Alone, she sits out centuries.
He too - through replication - cannot die.
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Author's Note
Linda Talbot writes fantasy for adults and children. She now lives in Crete and as a journalist in London she specialised in reviewing art, books and theatre, contributing a chapter to a book about Conroy Maddox, the British Surrealist and writing about art for Topos, the German landscape magazine. She has published "Fantasy Book of Food", rhymes, recipes and stories for children; "Five Rides by a River", about life, past and present around the River Waveney in Suffolk; short stories for the British Fantasy Society, and stories and poetry for magazines.
Contact blog: https://lindajtalbot.wordpress.com
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