Seven Poems

by George Kalogeris

MONK

Cavafy, Seferis, et al: I came to them first
In Kimon Friar’s faithful English versions.
Friar, whose name in Greek was Kalogeris—

Demotic for monk.Was clever Kimon Friar,
Close friend of Ezra Pound and James Merrill,
Related to us? His thick anthology

Was filled with voices that were thrilling to me—
But it was my mother’s anxiousness I heard,
Talking on the telephone with her cousin,

Calling from Greece: “Yes, he’s here, Andóna.
But his head is always buried in his books.”
Yet weren’t Cavafy, Seferis, et al also

Calling from Greece? And now I lift my bald,
Contemplative head from a book, if only to learn
How late at night it is—and that’s when I hear it

Again, that low oracular voice from the kitchen:
“I’m worried that this kid will never get married,
Andóna. Alone, he’ll end up alone, Andóna.”

AKOVOS FROM A DRONE

It’s only when I open up the attachment
That I see it, as seen from above the clouds:
My father’s village, way up in the Peloponnese.

Olympian email sent by my cousin Perry—
Pericles Christópoulos. Stucco houses
Clustered against the cliff. Terra cotta rooftops

Bright as pistachio nuts. And that sugar cube
At the very peak—it must be tiny St. George.
Ákovos with its olive groves aglow.

Ákovos as seen by the Eagle of Zeus.
Ákovos as photographed from a drone…
But nothing like that snapshot I saw as a child

Whenever I entered our parlor, where it was always
Ákovos up close, but not in color—
Circa 1940. For all I knew

It was all in black, and staring back at me
From under the hood of her village shawl. I mean
That grandma I never knew, but there she was:

Ancestral shade with one hand over her heart.
And lo, in the valley of the shadow of
Our empty parlor, I saw it: the voice of silent

Lamentation: Ákovos from a drone.

CLASSICS ILLUSTRATED

Late Saturday morning in my best friend’s house.
I’m ten years old, reading the Iliad
In the Classics Comic Book version, when Mr. Tsiotos

Enters the kitchen in his waiter’s outfit.
He’s ready for another twelve-hour shift
At Jimmy’s Harborside in Boston, where he’ll

Be shouldering the loaded trays till midnight.
For once he doesn’t greet me with Yiasou Yiorgo!
Instead he picks up the comic book and frowns.

“Achilles and Hector?” he mutters. “Mythologia.”
And now, in his native demotic tongue, the epic
Pronouncement: “The heroes of 1821

Are greater than anything in Homer.” And then
He rattles off the Kleftic Hall of Fame:
“Makriyánnis, Kólokotronis, Androútsos…”

Then out the back door and down the porch steps he goes,
That Greek immigrant from the tiny village
Of Kókova, who fought against the Nazis.

His silver tray as shiny as anyone’s shield in Homer.

ASTYANAX

Hector and Andromache’s kid, still young
Enough to panic at seeing the massive, swaying,
Horsehair plume of his father’s helmet. That’s when
The hero takes off the crimson-crested bronze,
And sets it down. Then picks up his stricken child.
Homer says the doting parents are “laughing
Through their tears,” as if we could read the entire
Story of shining Troy in their doomed faces.

Imagine my surprise when I turned six
And Uncle Harry gave me his US Navy
Sailor’s cap as a birthday present. The snow-white,
Pleated cloth lay flat as a folded napkin.
And sleek as the jutting prow of a battleship
Returning from Iwo Jima. And me just old
Enough to read the name inscribed with a black
Marker: HARÁLAMBRÓS KÁRANIKÓLAS.

That long Greek name—so long its letters went halfway
Around the brim. It all came back in Book Six.
And O my covered eyes! How the grownups laughed
When I tried it on for size, and my head was swallowed
Up by the sailor’s cap. A laugh just loud
And giddy enough for the ghost of Astyanax
To hear—and there he is, the loser’s kid,
Chin-strapped to the party-hat he never wore.

MAGIC CASEMENTS

I was new to my father’s village, and just starting out
In poetry when I beheld a creaky
Pair of wooden shutters unfold the sweep
Of the Peloponnese. What swam into my English
Major’s awestruck ken was not that casement

Charmed wide open by the nightingale’s song,
But all those looming peaks that walled them in,
My old-world kin. Entrapped, perhaps, since Lord
Knows when—the reign of king primordial Pelops?
Is it any wonder then as Keats envisions

His magic portal “opening on the foam
Of perilous seas forlorn” that I should picture
The dip and turbulent pitch my elders endured,
Along with so many others, forlorn, in steerage?
But nothing in the nightingale’s voice could ready

Me for that wild, blood-curdling shriek I heard
When rusty, ancestral shutters were bolted shut
On all those left behind in the tribal dark.
At least that’s what it sounded like. Forlorn:
The loaded word is like a rickety hull

So racked by waves its rocking tolls me back
To those at least two hundred migrants who drowned,
The other night, in earshot of Greek harbors.
Egyptians, Syrians, Palestinians...
The women and children down in the sealed-off hold.

ANGINA

It sounds like the name of some Aegean island
With brightly painted doors and painted boats,
And windowsills with flower boxes. O pastel
Harbor mirrored in tourist calendar azure,

And everyone taking their noontime nap!Angina.
Imagine stucco as white as the whitest china.
A donkey with two enormous bushels of wheat
Strapped to its back and drooling goops of saliva.

Angina. It calls for that pill the laborer
Puts under his tongue—his skeptical Greek tongue—
When his face goes pale and his lips turn blue. Angina.
It tightens around his chest like the coils of the Hydra.

Angina. It conjures up my father’s shade
In flannel pajamas, still clutching the kitchen sink.
For once my mother doesn’t wake up in time.
Until the nitro kicks in, I too can’t breathe.

GREEK VILLAGE WAKE IN THE TOWN OF WINTHROP

It was that hesitant, mournful, processional line
I heard: “But, oh, our people, where are they?”

As if the shade of William Barnes had whispered
The words to me right out of the rhythm of

The line I was standing in, with all those other
Shuffling feet in single, implacable file.

It was those open, funereal blossoms, none
With the “smoky blueness” of Bavarian gentians,

But all like torches along the walls of Dis.
It was the ones who kept asking what only their shrug

Could answer: Tí na kánoume?—“What can we do?”—
Demotic Greek for “we die.” It was a parlor

With crimson carpets so plush they never wear out,
But nowhere near enough fancy armchairs and couches

For all the company that keeps arriving
To sign their names in the open book whose text

Is nothing but names: “He, she, all of them—yea.”
It was sooner or later somebody saying, “Too bad

It’s only at these things we see each other these days.”
It was the length of that formal, meandering line

That just as abruptly comes to a halt you know
Is coming but never see it coming until

You get to those who are closest to the corpse.
Quick hugs and handshakes. Vapid consolations

I cringe to utter yet do, repeatedly.
And then, again, that gravid, shrugging, helpless,

Identical tone of their Tí na kánoume?
And lowered eyes by the open lid of the casket.

But it’s not the end of the line until I reach
The widow, Mrs. Mánoloúles, and face

Her ravaged countenance of arrested calm.
And she, aglow through her tears, honored that I,

Being a college professor, had taken the time.
But it was no bookish allusion to the poets

She read in my face: it was the lineaments
Of her friends, my long-dead parents. Yet who was I

That Lamentation’s eyes should be full of praise?
I was in line with everyone else at Kirby

Rapino’s Funeral Parlor, and this was a Greek
Village wake in Winthrop, Massachusetts.

And those are torches along the walls of Dis.
And that was where we were going, one by one.

March 15, 2025

George Kalogeris's most recent book of poems is Winthropos (LSU, 2021). He is also the author of Guide to Greece (LSU), a book of paired poems in translation, Dialogos, and poems based on the notebooks of Albert Camus, Camus: Carnets. His poems and translations have been anthologized in Joining Music with Reason, chosen by Christopher Ricks (Waywiser, 2010). He is the winner of the James Dickey Poetry Prize, the Stephen J. Meringoff Award, and the Sheila Margaret Motton Prize.

Cover photo: George Kalogeris reading at the Longfellow House.