The
harbour’s just a jetty
lined
with rocks,
an air
brushing
the lampposts
and
shingle.
Over
it looms the massive mountain,
the
seat of Poseidon
when
people still made sacrifices,
loved,
innocent of sin
and
bearded men in robes
smelling
of incense,
the
sad blessings of the Lord.
The
Springs that go back to those days
modestly suggest healing
where
praying fails.
Plane trees
offer
Thermá refuge on the slopes of mount Saos
peopled
by girls in
Indian silk,
by
the retired in search of longer life.
Resting
in the music
of old idols,
reading
the words
of
the ancient poets
we
wallow in the harmonies of crickets.
This
is how to make the world stand still,
the
way it does in winter
when almost
everyone
awaits
the summer on the mainland,
when
sometimes snow
slides
down the cracking roofs
and
the mountains of Thrace stand out
clearly
in steely, pre-human light.
Beyond
the jetty
not
even an abandoned dinghy
for
anyone who’d risk the crossing;
as people
once
must
have drifted ashore
on
something
that
inspired a faith in this far island,
urged
on by a dream, a vision
or the fear of
gods,
those
creations of the half-unconscious mind
that
weighed down the earth
with
an undamped power
still
smouldering
in all
our life-imaginings.
Poseidon
on
his sharp-upreaching throne
uncomfortably
presides
over
a handful of houses, the Springs,
the church
that
sets its bells against the music,
making
us drift away
to
days that in our minds reshape themselves,
reshape
themselves again :
the
road down to the harbour
a
straight line
in
this landscape of mountain
and
primeval tree.
Original
title: Loutrá
(Samothráki)
From:
Kees
Klok, In dit laagland.
Gedichten, Wagner & Van Santen, 2005.
Re-written
in English by the author and Susan Wicks.
