The Girl From The Aegean Poem by Shafeeq C P

I

To be the bystander of such a slavery
In God's own country or cow's own country,
To lose your wit either too left or far right,
With noisy ceremonies and limited thought,
Watching deified heads and nullified fans,
Sedated by gadgets and charmed by dunces,
This is no country for the middle-ages
For the aspirant to the path of the sages.

II

A man with less life and more poetry,
Dreams lulled me to that land of pottery
Where the continents meet and cultures melt.
I sat under the tree of no east or west
Near a monument that has been transformed
Into church, mosque, or museum as informed,
And I burried my complexes at the muse's den
To be a Byzantine, a Christian or an Ottoman.

III

As I walked and reached the Marmara shore
A ship from the Aegean was lowering its anchor,
And I sat in a well-scented Turkish coffee bar
From where I could watch the sea too far.
As a sudden flash of light, a Platonic girl
From the Aegean ship walked on the whirl,
Landed the shore and walked straight to me,
Sat briskly face to face and talked to me.

IV

The girl opened her bag of ideas from the schools
Of ancient times to the present day souls
And in an imploring tone asked me to open
My heart so that she must know what happen
In those red chambers that have stories
Either black or white, and often grey worries
Concerning things, people and ideas
In the form of ethos, pathos and phobias.

V

I kept on telling my stories and worries
And she kept on listening with oft queries
When I smiled she smiled with happy sighs
When I cried she cried with blood dropping from eyes.
I felt like my heart was poetically squeezed
Through her eyes till the blood oozed
From my heart to her and from her heart to mine
In a dreamy state that I can never undermine!

VI

Unlike the thick-walled feminine complexes
Of my land, she consumed my heart's reflexes
With its ids and egos, both crude and refined
Till she reached the pilgrim soul unidentified
By those who have sat and chatted at home
From the time I came out of the womb of my mom.
That's the reason why I love to dream with intensity
Just to achieve some momentary eternity!