Below red cliffs silk-starred with native
cyclamen in early spring, the city's entrance
narrows to a needle's eye, a vaulted alley.
By the west rampart the house with fading
burnt siena walls, rust in the balcony's
wrought iron, poet and siblings gone. A bronze
bust in the courtyard gazing sightlessly
towards the sea, in life his muse gave tongues to sky
stone water and mortality. The Byzantine citadel
that crowned the rock's rough sanguine dome
harboured bishops corsairs widows courtesans
and poetry.
The poet Ritsos heard their distant
footfalls in the cobbled lanes, strange voices
in deserted rooms, the walls' and bastions'
muffled groans; listened to the skeins of sound
spun out of time's conspiracies, the rasp as bluff
met thorn and husk, the wind in its laboratory,
the reminiscing of a time-warped city.
He sought his bitter truths amid intransigent
austerity: light and the frugal water, stone
entered the marrow of his bones. Banished
to the Colonels' hell of thirst he dreamed of freedom,
grace, drawing upon the well he'd made, guarding
the source of stubborn faith, to seek coherence
in the blind mess others called reality.
I come as if to ask his blessing, prematurely
and too late: the bronze bust and austere
white tomb are ciphers of an outlived space;
yet this stony earth, the sea, evoke his spirit
palpably, plain as the red geranium upon his grave.
Note: Yannis Ritsos (1909-1990) was incarcerated in various detention camps, including those on the former prison islands of Yaros and Makronisos, for his left-wing political beliefs, which took the form of a lifelong commitment to ideals of social justice. His poetry received many international honours and awards, including the Lenin Peace Prize in 1977, and was nominated ten times for the Nobel Prize for Literature. Many of his poems have been incorporated into musical compositions by composer Mikis Theodorakis. Monemvasia, Ritsos's birthplace, is a fortified Byzantine city on a rock in the sea, connected to the south-east coast of the Peloponnese (Greece) by a causeway.