I wrote quite recently about a trip to Kefalonia where we stayed by chance in a village where Byron [rock-star Romantic poet and lover of all things Greece] had a house. My heart was full of the spirit of this beautiful place whether it was the island itself, the lovely, warm people, the fabulous food, and perhaps beneath all of that the sense of a literary past. Some of that was down to the British poets of the late eighteenth and early nineteenth century whom I loved [and love] and read voraciously as part of my English degree, and some of it the sense that as a European much of our culture is down to the Greeks, so a visit to Ithaca, island home of Odysseus, celebrated by Homer was quite a moment.
I wrote three sonnets about all this while we were still in Greece, to celebrate this literary past, together with a visit to a Greek church where I lit a candle and came up with a new motto for myself as an anxious person. ‘Hold fast’.
Here are the sonnets for the new collection, and rather like the final poems in ‘A Bench for Billie Holiday’, Valley Press [2018] they say something very important to me about ‘connectedness’ to the past, each other and my own inner life.
Three sonnets from Kefalonia
58: Byron in Metaxata
Statue of Byron in the village square,
Handsome, battered, and long venerated,
Looking out with a damaged, searching stare
Over what he loved and celebrated.
He spoke and still speaks for everyone,
And the debts to this place we all share
The stories and myths told and handed down,
All the old philosophy founded here.
But the isles of Greece will always be
Where he found his truest and safest home
The misty mountains set in the still sea,
The place where we pilgrims have always come
In search of the things we’ve lost or miss
In the faint footsteps of Odysseus.
59: Argos
This was the way he, wily, travel-stained,
Came limping to where fishing boats were tied,
Looking around for what had still remained,
Tired eyes where hope and joy had almost died.
In disguise through villages of his youth
Recognised by no one but going home
What would be left, just the bitter truth
That, after twenty years, not much the same.
But then the corner of his house was near
A joyful rustle from a bed of rags and straw
Argos had waited through each long year
He wagged his tail, whined a last welcome now.
Then the sweet sadness of his bursting heart
As his swallow soul could at last depart
60: Amulet
Greece has many messages still to tell;
The old man in the taberna who said
That laughter would help us live long and well
All the while laughing as he dipped his bread;
The spell of sand and beaches, Ithaca
The mountains curved in trees and mist
The changing colours, ribboned roads, the sea
The sense of who’s walked here in the past;
The coin I wear around my neck shines bright
Has him on it; he arrived home at last,
I touch it as one would an amulet
And it will remind me to hope and trust.
I realise in the church’s candle glow
‘Hold fast’ the only words I need to know.
