How this weather is suffocating us
Signals
or’
So the road goes to Kyrenia.
A little further you see the mountains
A suspicion of the sea.
– Mountains are not made of flesh,
you told me
They just stay where they’ve always been.
Who accounts for the dead?
On a slope,
on top of Saint Hilarion
or on the beach?
One bell tower is not enough
nor the tree in the square of Bella-Pais
to redeem them.
Destruction abounds
in the streets
where you were yesterday
people were playing their unsuspecting game.
How many years has this castle been standing?
You climb on top of him
as eight centuries ago.
The stone heavy, the hatch
it turns like the mill in the bottom of the earth.
Voice lost that comes and comes again.
In Kyrenia
that became a dream
how this weather is suffocating us
the weather that treads on her is unrelenting.
To where?
You look at the mountains in vain.
This road has been closed.
They still beat the rock,
they bind the mountain as then
which the daughters of Ocean mourned
under his shadow.
But the olives
which took root along with the cycle of the sun
they know how to wait.
They went through the tragedy of the dream
which becomes soil, wine, lemon blossom
which becomes a glass on a table
while the people around sit to quench their thirst
in the poor fisherman’s house
which transparently stretched to accommodate a boat
sunk three thousand years ago in the seabed.
You don’t leave him that way
the barbed wire fence.
He sinks inside you like a ship
it hurts you along with the iron that blocks it
light penetrates you like dirt.
You can’t forget the dead.
The Erinyes will chase you
on this road that goes to Kyrenia.
Poem by Kostas P. Michaelidis, from his collection (Nicosia, 1980).
Kostas Michaelidis (1928-1998) was born in Limassol and studied philology at the University of Athens and philosophy at the University of Munich. He worked in Secondary Education and at the University of Cyprus.
His poems and studies (philological and philosophical) were published in Cypriot and Greek literary publications, as well as in foreign scientific journals.
Michaelidis’ poetic work is inspired by his philosophical quests, existential anguish and the tragedy of the human person, but also by the Cyprus Tragedy.
At the end of the 11th century, the Byzantines built the castle of Agios Hilarion and erected the homonymous temple in the western part of the mountain range of Pentadaktylos, at an altitude of about 725.
Saint Hilarion was an ascetic who lived in a small cave, in one of the difficult and steep areas of the pit of Pentadaktylos, in the currently occupied province of Kyrenia.
In the area of the castle of Agios Hilarion he was about to lose his life, bravely fighting the Turkish invaders, on the morning of July 21, 1974, Major Georgios Katsanis.
The commander of the 33rd Commando Squadron (33 MKD) — more information about his life, war action and glorious death can be found here— was one of the 97 heroically fallen Greek soldiers on the martyred island of Megalonisos in the summer of 1974.
This article is dedicated to his memory.
Source: In
