Tag Archives

hoopoe

WORLD HERITAGE

We are heading directly south out of town

on Leoforos Knossou – Boulevard

Knossos – a straight kilometre long

dual carriageway with oleander bushes

in the central reservation, and lined,

on both sides, with parked cars and really useful

emporia: like banks, greengrocers,

ironmongers, and proper places to eat.

After Venezelio Hospital

it suddenly becomes a country road,

and shortly we arrive at the site,

and park up under a jacaranda.

 

Whatever the Boeing 737

Series 800 substituted

for fresh air has laid my grand daughter

and me a little low, so only

the idea – rather than the facts of

the excavation – appeals. Anyway

we have been here before. Now we are sitting

in the shade of a pine tree planted

by the archaeologist, Arthur Evans.

We can hear one of the official guides

who has a pronounced Australian

or New Zealand accent, and wonder

if she only guides visitors from

the Antipodes. In the quiet

after she has gone we hear the hoopoes

somewhere in the valley of olive groves

beyond the high wire-mesh boundary fence.

 

A tabby cat walks across the Western Court,

and people seem to give way to her.

My grand daughter follows with her camera.

When she returns she tells me the cat

had placed her kittens securely behind

one of Arthur’s pines. The photos show

the litter – some tabby too, some black and white –

suckling in what seems a tumble of fur,

the mother watchful. A small crowd gathered,

she tells me. I imagine the simple,

sentient spectacle: a tall, slender girl

photographing a cat and her kittens.

 

 

THE TOMBS OF THE KINGS, PAPHOS

The kings were interred within the city walls.

This necropolis – lying between the sea

and the newly finished dual carriageway,

The Avenue of the Kings – is a field

full of flowers this early April morning:

curry plants, sea lavender, hibiscus.

Carved deep into the limestone – a simple niche

or a house with courtyard and doric columns –

these were courtiers’ tombs. They were looted

aeons ago. Some were quarried for dwellings,

others used by squatters, outcasts. Mimosa

bougainvillea, oleander abound.

A gecko stills as a hoopoe rises up

erratically from a tomb – with its

flamboyant head feathers and its soft, sad call:

‘whoop-poo-poop, whoop-poo-poop.’

 

 

 

BEARINGS

David Selzer By David Selzer1 Comment1 min read469 views

They lie after loving in a shuttered room,

lit with an underwater vagueness,

replete with jasmine. They hear but

do not listen to the hoopoe calling

in the almond tree or the goats clinking

softly in the olive grove. They no longer

even hear the roar of the cicadas.

She lies in his arms. They sink into sleep,

lovers drowsing in a perfumed sea.


The spate plucks willows weeping from the banks

and careers them swirling, whether or not,

to waltz downstream with honeysuckle stems,

a bloated lamb. Do we change course, with charts

and signals, once, inexorably? Or

do we drift at wind’s and swell’s mercy,

unremarked and far into the night?


A lamp flickers. The mainland is mauve,

precipitous, its valleys covert, profound.

A flute moans in olive groves. Brief insects

chafe the night air. Behind them, waves

from Africa rush to shore. They have steered

for open seas yet homed on the past.

They will skirt the swamp. Upstream, where the river

is jade, beneath the invisible nets

swifts weave, on a low hill, are fate’s stone doors.

Priests and their chicanery resurrect

numberless tribes of the dead: old men and brides,

lovers and generals. The future

waits like an assassin.