"Our Land", Yannis Ritsos

Wherever I am in Greece (Tzoumerka, Zagori, Paxos, Corfu), 

Ritsos' poems and images connect and  resound, even where no olive trees can grow.

Yannis Ritsos, from Our Land:

We climbed the hill to look over our land:

fields poor and few, stones, olive trees…

We shaped the old man’s clothes

into a scarecrow against the ravens…

How did we manage to put our house and our life in order

with a hand made of stone? Up on the lintel

There’s soot from the Easter candles, year by year:

tiny black crosses marked there by the dead

returning from the Resurrection Service.

tr. Edmund Keeley