Peter Karargiris Poems

In a chamber suffused with emotion
By the light of innumerable dawns,
In a house betwixt forests and ocean,
Where the briar rose bristles with thorns;
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Fair Rose of all seasons;
Long enamored of you,
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Fiendish winds and unrelenting rains
Assail my oaken door
With icy hands and iron chains,
They chill me to my core
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Cling to my heart my lover
Through all the hours of night
And together let us battle
Against the dawning light.
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Each night, in silent splendor,
I see you shut your door
And for a span of hours
The world sees you no more;
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In exquisite abandon
I feast my eyes on you;
Your skin of golden honey,
Your eyes of boundless blue.
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Each day, by the dawn’s light I greet you,
I smile as you approach from afar;
The rabble thinks you only a woman
But I know you for the nymph that you are.
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Once, in the realm of sweet oblivion;
That vast empire of half forgotten dreams,
I saw a girl with eyes of pale vermillion
Dancing amidst the soft moonbeams.
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(Homage to Robert Graves)

I see you in the aethereal light
And in the deep solemnity of night,
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One of my favourite places here in my home town of Adelaide is the South Australian Museum and one of the museum’s most interesting rooms is the Ancient Egypt gallery, a room that I have visited countless times, I can tell you. One of the most beautiful and valuable of the museum’s possessions is the coffin and mummy of a woman called Renpit Nefert. She was bought by the museum in the 1890’s and judging from the style of her gorgeously painted coffin, she lived during the late Ptolemaic Period, (c.100 –30 BC) so she may have been a contemporary of Cleopatra. It is not known exactly where in Egypt Renpit Nefert was found as records were rarely kept in the 19th century and no other biographical details about her are revealed by the texts on her coffin which are, as tradition dictated, of a standard religious nature. But due to recent work on her by the museum, it has been revealed that she is well preserved and died in her late teens or early twenties and, judging by the quality of her coffin, her family were at least wealthy enough to afford to have her buried in style. She may well have been married and a mother, but we well never know. Her name means ‘Beautiful Year’.
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