ICONS
From the restaurant terrace on the cliff top
at Agios Giorgios, Cape Drepanos,
we can see the small harbour below,
its sea wall curved like a scythe and, opposite,
the flat topped, steep sided, uninhabited
islet of Yeronisos, ‘Holy Island’ –
set today in that special, placid blue.
Folk tales have Greeks, after the fall of Troy
and exiled from home, land there and build
a temple to Apollo. Excavations
suggest the sanctuary was founded
by Cleopatra for Caesarion,
her son by Julius Caesar, the heir
she hoped, to Rome – Apollo being the god
of archery, knowledge, medicine, plague.
A few miles south on what, before the hotels
and villas came, was a deserted shore,
Colonel Grivas, Greek Cypriot ‘hero’
or ‘terrorist’, landed one November night
in ’54 to expel the British.
The restaurant is packed with middle class
local families in their Palm Sunday best.
After our mezze, fish fresh from the harbour,
we tourist St George’s church along the cliff –
a modern chapel-sized basilica
with its own square and drinking fountain.
We light a candle, as we always do,
more ‘good deed in a naughty world’ than faith.
A steady footfall of true believers
kisses the glass fronted icon of the saint.
A votive pink baby doll hangs from it.
Fifty yards inland, where there are ruins
of a Roman city, is a medieval shrine
to the saint – once a prayerful place for those,
Greek or Muslim, before Partition,
seeking love or strayed goats and donkeys.
On the fountain is a crude mosaic
of the Roman Soldier/Christian Martyr
slaying a dragon with its devil’s breath –
in Palestine, perhaps, or Syria.
Three leagues south is Aphrodite’s Rock
where the goddess was born among the spume.
Nowhere full of myth and history,
of irony and contradiction,
delineated by paint on wood
or finds in the earth or words in the air
is far from here over the bluest,
most changeable of seas.
Sarah Selzer
April 27, 2018A shame we couldn’t visit the restaurant again this Easter Sunday….. closed for celebrations elsewhere! And Aphrodite’s birthplace now advertising a golf club and luxury apartments. Another splendid poem thank you!
Keith Johnson
April 28, 2018Sounds like the Cyprus poems are a set that could be rolled into one – curling back like a scroll:
BITTER LEMONS OF CYPRUS, Lawrence Durrell:
‘I had become, with the approach of night, once more aware of loneliness and time – those two companions without whom no journey can yield us anything…’
‘But that is what islands are for; they are places where different destinies can meet and intersect in the full isolation of time…’
‘Journeys, like artists, are born and not made. A thousand differing circumstances contribute to them, few of them willed or determined by the will – whatever we may think. They flower spontaneously out of the demands of our natures – and the best of them lead us not only outwards in space, but inwards as well. Travel can be one of the most rewarding forms of introspection…’
David Selzer
April 29, 2018Ah, more to come, Keith – so a long scroll. Colin Thubron’s A JOURNEY INTO CYPRUS is my favourite.