Crete

I

Crete, the horned god, hive of thunderclouds, double axe!
See the white bull emerging from the waves,
With the sun between his horns;
The day is drunk on raki, trying to ward off
The evil eye, reeling with erotic dreams.
Daedalus is busy with his next invention,
Crafting his loneliness into fantastic shapes,
Toys for the doom-hunted mind.
This stray mangy dog is a Turk reincarnated,
Thrashed and spat upon and starved,
Suffering the vengeance of centuries.
The spider orchid mimicks female scents
To lure a male wasp in courtly dance,
The praying mantis waits in supplication
For the ritual meal, the blessing.
The winged lion soars into the heavens,
The golden oriole sings on a branch.
The goddess holds up a snake in each hand.
Europa takes the bull by the horns.
I am the griffin in the field of lilies:
Find me in the Throne Room of the heart,
Alone among overturned jars.
A pair of Scops owls duets in the night,
Calling to each other with deep-sea pings.
I place my kiss upon your lips,
Like a believer after Mass on Easter Day,
Taking home a candle lit from the holy flame
And using the smoke to mark a cross
On the door lintel, to protect the house
From bad luck and evil spirits.
Now for the meeting under the plane tree,
The pilgrimage to the cave,
And the navigation of the labyrinth;
Who speaks out of the sarcophagus,
If not the man you once were?
O, dolphin seas, leaping and romping,
Filled with the music of lyre and lute,
And the double-headed axe of the sun!
Water pours from the lion’s mouth,
And the stony path leads upwards into the hills.


II

Every eight years, every ninety-nine lunar months,
At the marriage of sun and moon,
King Minos confers with his father Zeus,
And sits, enthroned, watching the dancers spiral,
In the courtyard of the palace at Knossos,
As the red man leaps through the bull’s crescent horns.

Corona Borealis,-
Crown that Theseus fetched up from the sea
And presented to Ariadne,-
Seven-towered silver castle
Of Arianrhod!
Asterius, no man can know your pain.

At a wedding feast
Demeter, seized with passion for the Titan Iasion,
Sneaks out with him
And the two make love
In the furrow of a thrice-ploughed field.

III

I enter an old church,
To find the frescoes intact
Except for the eyes, gouged out
By the Turks, the occupiers
Maddened by that clairvoyant Byzantine stare,
That angelic trance;
Raging against the Christian heresy,
They chiselled and hacked with their knives,
But the deep eyes pursued them in dreams.

How did evil enter the world?
Was it here from the beginning
Or did it just, while no-one was looking, sidle in?
And as for me,
I have sinned without stint,
And could I live my life again,
Would do the same, and worse.

In Arkoudiotissa cave, I turn my torch
On the bear-shaped stalagmite,
Sacred to Artemis, Mistress of the Wild Animals,
The stone bear leans over a cistern,
Replenished by dripping stalactites;
The ceiling is blackened with millennia
Of candlesmoke and incense.
From this cave the path wends down and down
The steep cliff, to the cave of St John the Hermit,
Who grew so stooped and emaciated
From his diet of roots and vegetables
That a hunter mistook him for an animal and shot him
And he crawled back to this cave and bled to death.

On the anniversary of their massacre,
The phantoms of the Cretan dead
Rise up at dawn, fully armed,on horseback,
From the monastery graveyard at Frangokastello
And silently proceed towards the abandoned fortress,
Dissolving, at last, into the sea.