I Never Was On Crete Poem by Rob Dyer

I never was on Crete
they say.

Yet
browsing the sharp honey
(bought from the Tunisian
marché Popincourt)
on my morning pain campagne
Here in Paris, chez Descartes, place Voltaire,
wondering if the snapper in the fridge
(caught yesterday in Greece, the poissonier said)
swam off Maleme Beach, or Sfakia,
I cannot tell I ever left, or you, or it.

Between Nikos’ lines of twisted Greek
I smell again the aftermath of tidal wave,
Idomeneo
the rotting Bull-god in Dikte’s cave,
and hear the bees of Crete swarm and buzz
angry, regenerate within -
Oh Zeus, they gave me 50 jars to eat
at my wedding feast
alas, that honey but wet my thick moustache,
it never reached my lips
or soothed my loss,
Founded on mist for a brief lightning flash
blazed up to vanish
under savage freedom’s rattling cry
of a falling kotuku.

How often I have
walked with you across the German map of Crete
torn from the paratrooper’s hand you killed
marked with the rendez-vous he’ll never make
tomorrow morning,
you, buried by the stoney bed to Modhion.
(I wonder if you know the wound the foetus made,
breathed down my right lung by your mother’s angry curse.)
The curse remembered, limber form within.
It was he that kept me by you,
until one night he swam away
flash of death white swimming foetus
and left me there, one half drowned..
Dear friend, old friend, is Tauhora, place of anger, now his home again?
Or yours?
Or mine?

Or can our hearts now soar above
at Pataua
as when we were boys together
deathless, citiless
behind the white, soaring wings?