By: James Zaferopolos
You hear the twitter of them, off, the furies, as they drift,
Descending to the water, slowly, like a flock of birds.
They settle down amidst the broken columns
And the statues, buried, half in sand, and half in water, where
The water sighs and meets the silent shore, as if
Those broken remnants of your distant past
Were trying, desperately, with waning strength
Of mind and spirit, to bestir themselves, to rise,
To life, again, a life the furies haven't had,
For centuries, been able, yet, to stir. Being stuck,
Through generations, in the sand
Of our forgetfulness, our stone-frozen old fathers
Waver under the trembling water, where they seem to
Leave but little recourse to the longing soul, but
To imagine what their silt-filled mouths lack
The capacity to sing. Especially to such a seven year old
Boy, like me, peering through rippled water
At their time-disfigured remnants that
The boy discerns, imperfectly, sitting alone, out on
The pier, at Thasos, where he’s come to fish, as he
Recalls, fifty years hence, and more, trying to preserve
What in his aging mind, drifts further out to sea, each time
The tide swells to the age-smoothed pebbles at
The shore next to the slime encrusted pier, and
Then recedes, until, at last, I should
Suppose, the tide-worn consciousness
Is washed away.
The closer that you try to hear the whispers of
The distant past, the more those vicious hags,
The Furies, titter like cicadas in the
Grass-grown field that withers in the blinding light;
The furies' twitter escalates, until it turns
Into a shriek, and the pathetic howls that torture you
Become some sort of bitter accusation.
Who can absolve the world in which we live today,
As George Seferis said, of these, the morbid
Sins of time and memory, the sins the furries thus accuse us of?
Who will there be, in time to come, who will remember
What has long since died, and now exists, frozen in stone,
Under the water, like a memory suppressed, if we, ourselves, can
Hardly bring to mind that past locked in the stone the sea has
Worked for ages to obliterate? Who can there be to come here,
At some future time, and do the heavy lifting of the stones,
To set the stones up, one on one, from where they'd
Fallen down these many centuries ago, if we, ourselves, don't
Undertake the holy effort now, because we think we
Cannot manage it? And Then? And then, what will the future do
But try to grant forgiveness to the feckless soul for its complicity
In time’s betrayals, as it desperately replaces truth with fancy, and
Invents a past that never really was?
James Zaferopolos lives in Cleveland, Ohio. He is a retired professor of history. He was born in 1946 in Northern Greece, of a refugee Anatolian-Greek family. His father died when he was one, and his mother and he came to America in 1946. He has been writing poetry since his boyhood in Greece. At 72, he is just now making an effort to publish. To date, this constitutes seven poems recently published in the on-line journal, Mediterranean Poetry.
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