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
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