Selected poetry
Eudoxia
shepherd wife
The shepherd wife has one word
for her cosmos – isychia:
here is isychia, she tells strangers.
Without amenities — no water,
electricity — her house clings to a small
crease in the hills, a tortoise shell;
sea forces strips of blue between
the planks of outer walls
that have no windows to admit
the sky, the hills’ harsh beauty.
Fuel is scarce, so scarce
you walk for miles to find
a well-grown tree, or to fetch
springwater with the donkey.
The shepherd wife comes smilingly
to meet me, bloodstains on her shoes
from the chicken sacrificed
that morning for the Christmas meal.
Her legs are swollen painfully
from hours tending open fires,
the bread oven; plain sadness
in her eyes for absent children.
Lover of the hills
where her heart lives
this woman was and is, although
each spring is brief,
the winters insupportable, and summer
an exactitude of heat
that withers skin and leaf.
The old austerities of place
devour her days.
isychia: quietude, tranquillity
Spiridoula
shepherd’s daughter
That little whitewashed cube of cottage
wedged where two hills form a crease,
a few wind-harried bushes
like a draggled corsage pinned to cleavage,
all the blinding azure of the sea
touching the island's feet, and when
the evening lamp is doused, the fields
of stars like desert sheep —
Higher on the scarp, the shepherd's daughter
showed us broken shrines, rudimentary
altars, cruciforms incised in stone facades,
skulls of bulls with horns intact, affixed
to spars and boundary markers, placed
as if to warn as well as guard
where two worlds seemed to meet,
Byzantine fusing with Minoan Crete.
I know those folk don't live there now.
They've given up their herdsmen's ways
and moved to town, and grown old,
and Spiridoula's hair is grey —
Stephanos
the shepherd’s son
Caught between two worlds, in thrall
to patterns generations made;
striding the mountainside as dawn
flares up beyond the dark Aegean,
guiding and propelled by tintinnabula of bells
worn by his unruly goats, though not
compliant, docile sheep — Stephanos,
the shepherd’s son, who waits for six
sisters to wed, contributing meanwhile
to dowries, dreams of summer
when they’ll come, the eager women
from abroad, to flock like pigeons
in the port, where lonely shepherd youths
will linger in the evening tourist haunts.
There was one so fanciful, she claimed
a pregnancy with him — a fifty-year-old
lassie from the highlands of the distant north.
It gave him food for thought when lightning
ricocheted dementedly from crag to crag
along the mountaintop above his shepherd hut.
By nature he inclined to silence, habits of
a solitary. Women trusted him implicitly.
They sensed his innate kindness.
Antics of the lustful Pan were not ways he
would emulate. Used to his unmarried state,
he settled for tradition’s lot, beside the shepherd
and his wife, a comfort in their