Three Poems and Two Translations

by David Mason

Skatoúli

The Greek for Little Shit, a name my friend
        bestowed on a cat so small,
so battered and grimed from one scrawny end
to the other, she was hardly there at all.

One of the crowd who fed at tourists’ feet,
        she was kicked by waiters, chased
by the wild dog bullies in the back street.
Daily her whole existence was erased,

yet she came shivering to my bungalow door
        at night without a sound.
I let her in. She curled up on my floor,
a drenched ghost of a life still hanging around,

too weak to climb up on my little bed
        but grateful to share my plate.
I stroked the matted fur about her head
and watched her sleep while I kept working late.

And when at last one night she didn’t come,
        what I felt was not surprise.
In this life of hard things, it was one thing done.
But sometimes at night I still see her eyes.

Seferis at Skala

A cold January in Ankara, he wrote,
and for the first time since his arrival
all the sparrows, without exception,
have disappeared.

Everything a sign. Two nights later
his journal contains one word:
Angelos.
Was he waiting for the angel?

No, it was his brother who had died
far away in America.
To his sister he wrote, Be brave.
But to himself:
The dreadful war nature wages
to prevent the Poet from existing.

That summer at Ephesus
he walked the marble road
past the library façade
to the theatre where Paul had preached,
now an empty C of seats in tiers
half-buried by the hillside.

This on his sister’s advice
to busy himself,
to look at the world again
without despair.

He wanted to swim in the sea
and went there in company,
drawn by the exile’s road
that history had severed,
to Skala, his childhood village,
and the stone house with its little garden,
the gate rusted, the lower windows
broken. He still possessed the key,
and now like large rats
the children of strangers
writhed through the gate
to play where he had played as a child.

He went to the sea’s edge
but nobody spoke any longer the Greek
of the fishermen, its poetry and salt.
He wrote of a nightmarish stillness,
though the sea was terribly alive.

Poor Skala. Everything shrunken.
At the house he was unable to find
his initials, carved when he was ten
with a garden trowel.

Reading by Candlelight

                Greece 1981

Maybe it wasn’t fire but the salt wind
in roof tiles, the candles guttering out
as if a night of books had made me blind—
I had to win the light back, tend the flame,

my life dependent on a fumbled match
till chapter’s end, when all of kingdom come
followed the blessed word, receding fast
in tallow smoke. Outside, the steady scratch

of an olive branch, and it was dark at last.

Prayer (C. P. Cavafy)

A sailor is held down in the depths of the sea.
His mother, unknowing, goes to the ikon of Mary,

lights a tall candle and fervently prays
for his quick return, for fair-weather days—

always to windward keeping a listening ear.
But while she appeals and prays in a fit of fear

the ikon is listening too, solemn and black,
knowing the lad she waits for won’t come back.

                                              —translated by David Mason

Interval of Joy (George Seferis)

We were joyful all that morning,
my God how joyful.
First the rocks, the leaves and flowers glistened
then the sun
a mega-sun all thorns but so high in the sky.
A nymph gathered our troubles and hung them in
a forest of Judas trees.
Lovers and satyrs played and sang
and you saw rosy limbs of small children
among the black laurels.
We were joyful all that morning,
the abyss a closed off well
where the tender hoof of a young faun tapped.
Remember his laugh? How joyful!
Then clouds, rain and the damp earth
stopped your laughter as you lay down in a hut
and opened your large eyes, watching
the Archangel practice with his burning sword—
“Inexplicable,” you said, “inexplicable.
I don’t understand people;
however much they play with colors
they turn everything dark.”

                                               —translated by David Mason

October 23, 2025

A former poet laureate of Colorado, David Mason has lived often in Greece and now resides in Tasmania, Australia. His many books include Ludlow: A Verse Novel, Sea Salt, The Sound: New and Selected Poems, Pac/fie Light and the forthcoming collection Cold Fire. Books of his essays include Voices, Places and Jncarna1ion and Metamorphosis. A Greek translation of Ludlow by Dimitrios Zacharakis will be appearing soon.