PARADISE MISLAID

Our favourite morning walk that first visit

was through Elounda’s old town, along the shore

past the restaurants – ‘Kalimera!’, ‘Yassas!’ –

close by the salt pans the Venetians made,

over the bridge across the French canal,

and beside the gulf towards the pebbly beach

at Vathi. Other than a woman in black

on a donkey – ‘Yassas!’, ‘Kalimera’ –

we would pass no one on the peninsula.

We would sit in the shade of an olive tree

on the edge of the beach. It was as if

the rest of Crete, apart from the narrow

littoral we could see around us, were

only shimmering mountains untouched – and sky

unsullied all the way to Africa.

On our next and final visit we stopped

before we reached the beach. We could see it

littered with blue plastic supermarket bags,

some faded, some pristine, shifting in the heat,

the olive tree stranded. Across the bay

was Elounda – on the supermarket’s roof

a sign in red neon.