The house in happier times. A wedding feast is going on. The organ players, accompanied by a group of guests, are approaching our house. My grandmother is at the entrance of the yard.

   I wrote this poem after coming across a pink robe in one of the closets in my country home in Greece. My mother had loved shopping and enjoyed buying gifts for friends and loved ones. Every time I rummaged through her purchases, I always found something interesting, even if some had become too old-fashioned to wear or use.
     One day I unearthed a pink robe with the price tag still attached to it. It had  been bought  almost 3 decades earlier, from a department store in Canada. It had a small pocket with a bright flower embroidered on it.
     I removed the price tag and put it on. Many items  had been destroyed over the years, as the mice made themselves comfortable in the drawers and cupboards of the century-old house, where mom's old treasures lay.
     The woolen kerchiefs and traditional dresses my mother and grandmother had worn daily now had holes in them, eaten by moths that loved to work in the dark secrecy of the uninhabited house. The bright colored ribbons the women  used to braid their long hair with were still packed away, unused,  along with countless aprons, slips, girdles, pantyhose, Christmas decorations...a paraphernalia of memories and comical traces of some serious shopping therapy going on back then.
     I became melancholy. Surrounded by things, but no people. Silence.
My mother passed away 24 years ago. My grandmother 38 years ago.
     And this robe became a metaphor of not putting my life on hold but living it. Polyester resists stretching, creasing, shrinking. It resists the sun. It does not breathe.  "Listen, are you breathing just a little and calling it a life?" the poet  Mary Oliver asks.
Yes. I was breathing as much as the polyester robe was. It was time for some changes before it was too late.

                                  pink polyester robe

               bury me in my
               pink polyester robe
               rot resistant in its
               timeless cheapness
               promises of a
               wrinkle-free existence

             
             
   

Blue Teacup

It's so unsettling...
sitting across the table from you
hands yearning to
touch hands
holding the edge of blue china
 instead.

                                     
                                                                       Ruins

          I cannot fathom
          love among the ruins;
          since broken am I
          more shattered than 
          an ancient stone

          what was the foundation
          of our ties?
          was it perhaps
          a few glorious lies?

Songs of the lake

     Kastoria, named after Jupiter’s son Kastora, is a beautiful city in Northern Greece. It was from here that Alexander the Great began to join the rest of the states, which made up the whole Macedonian state. Located on a promontory, it is known mostly for its Byzantine flavor: With over 150 Byzantine churches, the eminent Belgian scholar, Henri Gregoire, said that “the city can write the History of Byzantine art itself.”

     Then, there is the lake: a true feast for the eyes of any resident in the Macedonian area, whose closest proximity to the sea lies in Thessaloniki, 165 kilometers from the limestone mountains that surround this valley. After all, when the name of Kastoria pops up in the writings of the historian Prokopios, in 6 A.D, his point of reference is the lake and not the city. And there is of course is the claim that the city was named after the beavers -kastores-thriving in the lake.