Mare Nostrum
How to find the thread
uniting everything:
Pottery, donkeys,
artichokes, refugees
Who play the violin, are
doctors, or poets,
Feel pain on dry land and
underwater?
I watched them pushed by a
hot Sirocco, *
A maritime caravan without
fixed destination
Searching the direction
of the wind, the coast,
Nursing thirsty children
on the lap of the sea.
*****
They resemble the ancient
drama held in Ithaca.
War drives men away from
home, darkens wives
Eyelids, until the champion
returns exhausted,
His archery skills miraculously
untouched after
Twenty years of fighting political
enemies. Hungry
For his Penelope, he squints
at the sky for signs
Of Athena’s protection or
any new god
Influential enough to
save all Telemachus.
*****
Like yesterday, for some,
memories hang
Abandoned on olive tree
branches, burned houses,
A headless doll by the
sill. Still, thick strokes of blue
Painting the horizon and
its fishermen’s boats
Persist in my mind as my
every day companions,
My life-line. Tuna,
fished for centuries mindfully,
Are now butchered for the
benefit of plutocracy
Dressed on the outfit of Japanese
palates.
*****
You have the eyes of a sear,
she said,
Reading an uncertain
future on my palm,
Glancing at invisible
sunken ships, oars
Disintegrated, amphoras
still holding Garum *
From Málaga, the favorite
of the Republic.
She disappeared under fistfuls
of tight stars,
In a patera * filled
with two hundred souls
And a lamenting oud.
* Still, laughter,
The best medicine, echoes
across waves.
*****
Little has changed, same alluring
beaches
Beneath Icarus view, more
drowned descents,
Same seizing of exiles,
the new gladiators.
Similar feet border the
coast collecting
Goose barnacles,
treasures to eat or sell,
Wares sing out loud in
ancient tongues.
Still, I yearn to see
Ibiza from the Montgó, *
Climb Ÿabal al-Tãrik
* to salute African brothers.
*****
I walk to the shore which
brought me my first
Two languages, to
remember who I am,
At what ceremony I got my
scales, the chestnut eyes
Same to a woman who kissed
my cheeks in Ephesus,
Hair equal to sea-urchins
hidden underneath rocks,
Skin octopus-soft, like
the one curled around my leg
When I was ten, its
tentacles a million suction cups
Each one as afraid as I
was.
*****
From Algeciras to
Istanbul lives nurtured by the same
Liquid color dance to music
from a guitar called “home.”
It’s not just history,
but the Temple where we received
The Meter to
measure the purity of light, from the density
Of honey to the
unpolluted transparency of cellophane,
The thousand shades of this
ethereal pigment, this gift
Of presence always changing
ever vibrant, this sea
Reveals my people in the threads
engraved in its surf.
*****
First Published by
Odyssey.pm (May 2021)
Sirocco:
African wind which blows through Europe.
Garum:
Fish sauce favored by ancient Romans.
Patera:
Flat boat for hunting ducks, used by migrants crossing the Mediterranean to
Europe.
Oud:
Arabic string musical instrument, precursor of the lute.
Montgó:
Mountain by the sea in Denia, (Greek Hemoroskopium) from where one can see Ibiza.
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