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Cyprus

VESTIGES

We followed the signs from the car park.

Set on a promontory high above

the Bay of Episkopi, more or less intact,

was a Roman stadium, of classical

Olympic dimensions – eight runners,

two chariots’ wide. The early spring

late afternoon sun lit beige sandstone blocks

too big for the natives to have purloined.

As we were leaving a flock of goats chimed

in the scrub beside the stadium’s back wall.

 

That part of Cyprus officially

is British Overseas Territory,

as sovereign as, say, Salisbury Plain.

We passed an armed camp with high fences

and barrack huts and then, distantly

and also fenced, family quarters –

an estate of white semis with pitched roofs.

 

Only days after we had returned home

Tornados from RAF Akrotiri

launched missiles at sites in Syria.

Much of Eurasia is littered with

imperial ruins.

 

 

 

 

A DEATH IN THE ROYAL SUITE

She fell asleep as she often did thinking

of that first operation, the longest,

her team fourteen hours in the theatre,

a white child’s brain given to a black –

the furies raging. She woke at dawn wheezing,

coughing, chest tightening, inhaler out of reach,

knowing the attack for what it was,

hearing, somewhere distant, children’s voices.

In death her right hand was open as if

holding an orb, her left clutching her heart.

 

She had dreamt of the abandoned islands

of the lagoon; the broken bell towers,

the wild fig trees; the discovery,

with her girlhood’s lost companions, of an arm,

female, severed from a marble statue,

the supple hand holding an apple.

 

The famous surgeon died in the Royal Suite

that Easter Sunday when Armageddon came

at last to the Levant. She could hear

children egg-hunting on the greensward

five floors below – between waves breaking

in an attenuated roar, vestiges

of a storm out in the Cretan Sea.

 

Beyond the horizon to the east, countless

villages and cities went to smoke

then dust; deserts became relentless;

theologies cracked like bowls of eggs.

 

LOOK ON MY WORKS

If you stand in the Central Court of Knossos –

or in what is assumed to be the court –

and look north you can see, above the trees,

the top of the white geodesic radome

of a US air force tracking station

outside the hillside village of Gournes

less than ten miles from Iraklion.

 

The station was abandoned in ’94,

presumably as a contribution to

‘the end of history’. Much of it

has been looted and vandalised and left

to weeds but some parts house an aquarium,

a dinosaur park, an animal shelter.

Now Cyprus, Greece and Israel are allied –

in part to exploit off-shore gas reserves –

there is talk the base may be re-opened.

 

Sometimes in the millennia-old ruins

of the palace – the causes of whose

unrecorded abandonment has filled

volumes of conjecture – you may believe

you can hear a peacock calling, calling

in all its finery.

 

 

 

 

 

FLYING SOUTH

Ascending south east from Manchester, over

Eyam, the ‘plague village’, towards the Wash;

cruising over the Channel, observing

the shipping below me with wonder like some

latter day Bleriot; then Rotterdam’s docks

and the Rhine; sun glinting momentarily

like fireflies, and I am nonchalant

as Icarus, mindful as Daedalus,

noting place names freighted with histories;

past Munich, and the bared Austrian Alps,

then due south along the Balkan Mountains,

smoke drifting north from polluting fires,

roads following the contours, rivers the colour

of onyx; then the coast, and sea water

the westing sun has turned to mercury,

with Mycenae rightwards, leftwards Troy;

descending over the Dodecanese

to Cyprus – island of Aphrodite,

wine and olive trees, worked out copper mines,

abandoned churches – with its new money

and its old divisions.