Cyprus

Bright waves shade with long strokes into shore,
Sea-sky hazes in the distance,
Stationary shimmer, out of time.
Gold-citron light Gregorian-chants
Over the mountains,
Cyclamens and anemones
Glitter the hillsides, swaying.
Sherbet of desire
Irradiates your veins as you gaze
Down tremulous coastline.

To violin and lute,
She dances,the bride, in white silk gleaming,
All glistening hair-coils, white-rose-twined,
Laughing with voluptuous mouth.
The moon’s elect, she trips, exalted,
Lissom and light on her feet.

In Aphrodite’s Temple the women
Once waited to be chosen,
Offering passion in sacrifice.
Now the House of the Goddess lies shattered,
Fluted stumps thrusting where columns once stood,
Ruined walls tussocked under stunted trees,
Bereft of all lush groves.

On avital Greek tombs,
Simple epitaphs bespeak those unknown lives
Now hopeless souls gibbering in the Underworld.
On funerary steles the figures stand in still farewell,
Embracing in familial love, hands touching,
Heads bent in communion.

In Larnaca stands the bust of Zeno,
his saddened face hardened against grief
With indomitable self-control, passions suppressed
So as not to unbalance the cosmos.

On the floor of a Roman villa:
Dionysus rides in triumphal procession,
Straddling a leopard-drawn chariot,
One hand clutching the thyrsus, the other
Pointing at his own ivy-crowned brow
To proclaim his divinity, his right to rule,
While all around a suite of dissolute acolytes
Gambols, playing cymbals and flutes.

St Neophytus fled to the barren hills,
Abandoning a bewildered family and a jilted fiancée,
And burrowed a cave in the rock with his own hands
High in the cliffside, reached only by a ladder
Which he would pull up after him to exclude the world.
This cell still contains the stone bench and table
Where the saint sat and wrote a furious diatribe
Against the island’s last Byzantine ruler.
Above the hermit’s sepulchre, hollowed out with his own hands,
Christ of the Anastasis smashes Hell’s gates underfoot
And pulls dead Adam back into the light,
And looks down with severe compassion
On the bones of Neophytus, awaiting resurrection.
Frescoes shine out from the grotto walls,
Neophytus carried to heaven by goldenhaired angels,
Flying between them with hands crossed on his chest,
Supported in their arms.

Amid a jungled gully glade,
The Fontana Amorosa bubbles up;
Whoever drinks from it will fall in love.
For here Aphrodite wedded Akamas, son of Theseus.
Hosts of butterflies jitter amid the vegetation,
Running water sounds faintly above the hush,
Glimmering between the eucalyptus trees,
Cascading from cliffs,
And fig trees plunge their roots into the pool.

Almond and cherry bloom in the Troodos mountain valleys,
Voluptuous humped bulks fading into sulky distance,
Invisible steams chatter down precipitous glades,
Salamanders scuttle among the trees.
Beneath the plane trees in a quiet village,
We sit drinking ouzo as evening anoints the radiant cornfields,
Bread is baking in a dome-shaped oven,
And a mandolin’s mournful whine haunts the air.
Eastertide at the Makheras Monastery: the congregation
Waits, bowed and dazzled by the towering iconostasis,
While the abbot sits ,enthroned, clasping the pastoral stave
While through the incense-laden atmosphere
His acolytes move about him, in saffron and yellow gleams,
Chanting, chanting in hypnotic rhythm
At midnight the abbot emerges through the Gates of Heaven
With the Holy Fire, and the crowd surges forward, excited,
As the incantation quickens: “Christ has risen!”
The lights go out. Only the tall candle in the abbot’s hand,
Held high above his head, glows with the fire of resurrection.
As he lowers it, a host of tapers jostle forward in tremulous hands,
Touching and mating, passing the flame from one to another,
As the flames move and multiply, everyone smiling
And greeting one another, “Christ is risen!” “He is risen indeed!”

Kalopanayiotis. In the valley chapel
Of the monastery of St John Lampodistas,
Renaissance murals painted by Italian hands shine out from the walls,
Worldly angels alighting in Tuscan courtyards on errands,
Urbane apostles posed against geometric landscapes,
Flamboyant Magi, worldly statesmen, straddle supple eager horses,
Trotting back to Babylon, that crenellated Umbrian hill town.
Here, among Byzantine abstraction, the vivid scenes palpitate,
Carnal opulence with a human heartbeat,
Not the mystical severity of the Greeks.

At Asinou Our Lady of the Pastures
Crowns a hillock, the little church in eucalyptus shade,
Russet stone against pine-dark hills;
Inside, the founder kneels over the south door in fresco,
Presenting his basilica in miniature to Christ,
Donating it in memory of an unknown woman
Who kneels behind him in jewelled diadem.
“Having been blessed in life with many things,
By you virgin, I, Nicephorus Magistros, a pitiful supplicant,
Erected this church with longing, in return for which
I pray that I may find you my patron on the dread Day of Judgment.””
Inside, a thousand saints swarm up the walls
In dour splendour, every arch, lintel and pendentive
Fierce with scowling inquisitorial faces,
Fingers raised in admonition, striking terror into the sinful,
Saints militant and ascetic, cunning theologians, monastic fathers,
Emaciated anchorites, stylites, bishops, martyrs and sages,
Whole legions soaring through the cosmos,
While above the sanctuary Christ the Pantocrator
Looks down in stern benediction, eyes staring away.

The Kyrenia mountains’ crags erupt into sky,
Razor-pinnacled and castellated,
Among lemon groves the Bellepaix Abbey ruins loom,,
On the hillside where wheeling swallows cry into the blue.
Cypresses rise in the deserted courtyard,
Cloister arches unfurl flamboyant around delicate tracery,
Harmonious and light,
Corroding in alchemical heat.
Yellow fennel bursts from fallen clumps of masonry,
The narthex in which Prometheus brought fire down from heaven,
And swallow-nested eaves breathe echoing sighs.
The monks fell into decadence, revelling in wealth and pleasure,
Even taking wives and quarrelling amongst themselves,
Forcing successive popes to intervene.

At Salamis stand the ancient Achaean tombs,
With their sacrifice of horses and slaves,
The small swift chariots and horses’ skeletons still in harness,
Swords, shields, spears and standards in array,
The cremated remains of warriors, ashes mixed
With jewellery and treasures from Egypt and Assyria,
Imported by this rough semi-barbarous tribe.
Ferocious summer heat trembles the sky,
The earth seems almost to be cracking apart,
Even the cicadas cease their shrill chorus,
As time stops dead, stunned into submission.

My apricot, my pomegranate, my fig, my melon, my peach!
The spring breeze tastes of lemon blossom;
The sea’s cradling motion works into your blood,
As peacock blue evening lulls the valleys.
The sea bursts among caves with dull reverberation
And scrabbles at the beaches with monotonous rhythm.
Tear a branch from a carob tree and you will see
A red wound the colour of human flesh.
I think of the flayed skin of Bragadino, heroic defender
Of Famagusta, whom the Turks betrayed,
Breaking their word that they would give him safe passage
After he at last surrendered the fortress.
They stuffed his skin with straw and paraded it round the fallen city.
It is now the languid autumn of ripened figs and grapes,
When snakes and lizards emerge from the stones;
Loud gnawing of silkworms in the mulberry leaves
Disturbs my mind. In forest fires, the worms
Perish with dreadful crackling and sobbing.