My Old Neighborhood

I visited my old neighborhood, where love rained and skipped on the

shorn knees of my heart — that speaks to my memory, that keeps you alive

I begin to numerate, search for you in the mirrored images

reflected in the rain drops.

On the four corners of our old home, hope as a sentinel treble’s in fear

I came to take, what it still gives, the dignity found in the poverty that never

allowed me to hunger

where I remember to whitewash my face in the humbleness of loulaki, that

my pride never reach above my spirit, above the branch where I am able

hang my basket, that I never shame those who loved me enough to build

upon my shoulders, and there I saw my childhood dreams embraced in the

doorframe encased in the umbra of my mother’s waiting arms

I feel your touch sheltered by time, on the linen of my well worn little

dresses, your scent exorcizes the thousands of versions of you, of me, cut

upon their pattern

as the foundation of our home leans in on me, a thousand years of antiquity

on the weight of one soul —at a time — and everyone sleeps as my mind

awakens to the wisdom that without the old there is no new,

when you love, truly love — the water of our tears nourishes,

listen, don’t speak, you’ll hear the stonecutter’s one word to my two,

Don’t speak, listen — you’ll hear the roar of the seas as my two tears break

upon the carved rivers in the blue skies that were my fathers eyes, the

years chiseled with the sweat on masonic brow of the stonecutter craft

The stones speak to my soul, that other world I knew, my humble home

stands in the tenements of my soma’s childish dreams that live upon the

fringes of hopes insomnia

That world my memory does not abandon to the dreams in the

lost pavements of time

As I grow I refuse to grow small, I’m going to drag you kicking and

screaming, stone by stone into the new world, amongst the caricatures of

cement jungles,— until that time that I can

find that one philosophy who will inherit my time, defend you against the

crumbling world around you

I visited my old neighborhood, and there my eccentricities lay scattered on

the stoep, around me my neighbors newness humiliated my humble origins

as I hang my spirit on their pride — that cometh before the fall, the walls of

its soul have withstood the breath of time, my basket filled by him who has

the last laugh,

Tell me my neighbors what do you praise with your shiny new pennies,

that love didn’t furnish my home with?

Copyright ©. R Tsambounieri Talarantas. July 2020. All Rights Reserved.