Today’s Poem: from Notes on My Father, by Katerina Anghelaki-Rooke
from Notes on My Father
The old man moved into his night
a boat all lights on the evening harbor.
The island was in small spring,
The sun came out suddenly
struck the tiles
and disappeared again.
What could the old man know now of spring?
He spelled it out like a child the ABCs
comprehending the flower slowly.
Already something like soil
he had become only surface.
This mortal moved into
the crack in coal
the old sack
loaded with the four seasons
the four ages
with deep aging.
Brown spotted hands
and desperate blue veins.
The dawn of his birth
the village was in snow
the melon patch purple with cold.
His father came from the woods
with a dead boar
slung over his shoulder;
he dropped it in front of the fireplace.
Snow and game
small magic signs
around a wintry belly
Silence . . .
someone is swaying in the garden
someone is fondling the soil
the white soil of night.
I’m waiting for the moon to grow
for all to ease in me
to remember
to remember all miracles
the unmet
most of all.
I want to be in what’s being born
and in what’s ending,
I cast spells on my departing father
spells of love.
At the end of night
at the end of the gully
at the setting of the moon
it was me leaving in love
spellbound
exempt in death
all my forces unmouldered
for eternity.
In a green pasture
in a shady pasture
in a barbarous pasture of oleanders
from under comes all this vegetation
I praise
from under begins
the ascent of fate.
~Katerina Anghelaki-Rooke