The last day & it's raining.
We hear it on the tin roof--
soft as the tap of the questing sticks
of blind martyrs.
It's only the sky emptying her tears.
The sunflowers you picked slump
in their vase, & the candle throws
our thin shadows against the wall
as we dress quietly.
As usual, I slip the iron key beneath
the mat.
All year it will wait for our return.
It will wait even if we never return.
-Michael Shepler
3/6/08
FOR YANNIS RITSOS, THE POET FROM DOFTANA PRISION
On this evening, May first, as the day turns to an inky spring blackness,
Not to be macabre my dead poet, friend, you, a comrade
of Greece and all the Peloponnesians that have struggled
dying from the sea and on the land against
the oppressors for centuries, more than hundreds of years of mankind,
my poet friend who is now dust and memory of red blood,
those red banners of thought and riddled poems burnt before
the Acropolis, by the generals and their toady sons,
And it happens here also my dead poet, that we live among tyrants
and pathetic generals who imagine that they are soldiers, but
who are none the less patsies for Presidents,
And here we find a country to war against because we are afraid
of our own insidious shadows that sulk in the air of America,
So believe me, wherever you are buried, famous Greek poet,
You who are more alive than me,
scuttled like an ancient trireme that once fought bravely,
but no more, but that does not mean the heart and oars of thinking
do not beat against the clash of waves…
Here, we live differently than you did in Doftana prison,
Except we do it here with the daily lies of voyeurism into everyone’s
lives, like who the dead slept with and who and why and when.
And yes, we eat like pigs, and sit before TVs, masking our
undisciplined deaths with cruel reality shows displaying
American youth acting like pimps for whole the world to see and adore.
It is your birthday, of all days. From the sweat of the earth
and the factories, you are alive, where the workers kill themselves from
work and the grime that covers their hands and
faces, to the drive in the used car or bus ride home,
where simple meals and a lover’s hand or wife’s embrace
awaits them, there you are out of prison, a Greek amid the people, more
aware than a dying and confused Socrates, more alive
than many of the Greek playwrights and poets that succored you in your
childhood, as you watched your family die and go mad.
Stone houses, olive trees, the Aegean sea at your back,
The faces and names of guerrilla fighters that you knew
and who gave their lives against the Nazi invader,
and you know, my friend,
You, poet are more alive than most of us who claim we live,
You, who as old man died with your sleeves rolled up
to write that last line of words that ripped into fear and longing
Yannis, you thought it was over, that the son of bitches had won,
But the struggle is the long battle. Remember my great poet friend,
The Peloponnesian War and we live it always in different ways…
As you did when you were alive and writing in prison, or making love
to your gentle doctor wife, or when you wrote
those simple poems about the people of Greece fighting, making love,
and arguing under the pale moonlight,
When the summer nights in Greece were alive with the fire and hunger
