"A Little More Mindful," a poem for Palm Sunday, Mary, and Athena

Downtown churches celebrate Palm Sunday, corner of 9th
and Broadway, Columbia, MO, 2015. Photo by Aliki Barnstone 

A Little More Mindful

—busy yourself with your daily duties, your loom, your distaff…

for war is man's matter…

—Iliad, Book VI

If I could be a little more mindful,

groom my dogs’ fur, remember

to shelve my books, shut the closet

and cabinet doors, hide away

my mess of clothes and dishes,

and graciously address every annoyance

(or worse than annoyance), perhaps

my sandals would glide up marble steps

and I’d find myself idle,

holding my peace, my desperate

thoughts left to themselves

at the bottom of the hill, while I turnover

in my palm some stones that hold

the spirits of those who do not cry out

praise for a king riding a donkey,

clothed in garments his mother wove,

her design covering his flesh from birth

until he hugged his shroud

on a road strewn with rags and palms

and wept over the city:

                         “If only you knew

on this day those things creating peace.”

Centuries before his word, their spirits dwell

in rubble, for countless wars

knock stone from stone.

They perished so long ago, their wanderings

and homes are the work

of archeology. Their pots are dust

the Athenian shopkeepers sweep away

each morning, along with the art

of their looms: the saffron

and hyacinth yarns spun for the owl,

chariot and wingéd horses

on Athena’s raiment, the story-cloths

on which the Fates dance and lament,

and teach child-bearers

             to weave defiance in a double purple web,

their textile and text incomprehensible to men.

Soldiers cannot divide the seamless robe

passed from mother to daughter,

mystery in a single thread.

--by Aliki Barnstone, forthcoming in New Letters 

and in her book, Dwelling, forthcoming with the Sheep Meadow Press, 2016

Athena holding a helmet and a spear, with an owl. 

Attic red-figure lekythos. 

between circa 490 and circa 480 BCE. 

Photo by Marie-Lan Nguyen. Metropolitan Museum of Art.

NOTE: “A Little More Mindful”: The biblical accounts of Palm Sunday are found in Matthew 21:1-11, Mark 11:1-11, Luke 19:28-44, and John 12:12-19. Luke 19:42 Jesus says, “If only you knew on this day those things creating peace.” (The translation is Willis Barnstone’s.) Jesus’s seamless robe appears in John 19:23. In some traditions, the Virgin Mary wove Jesus’s seamless robe, and he wore it his whole life; symbolically, Mary clothed Jesus in flesh. For more on Athena and story-cloths see Evy Johanne Hǻland, “Athena’s Peplos: Weaving as a Core Female Activity in Ancient and Modern Greece,” Cosmos: The journal of the Traditional Cosmology Society 20, 2006: 155-182.

The Ruins of Mega Livadi, Serifos

This past week, with what the Greeks call "the crisis" intensified, with the protestors in Thessaloniki saying "NO!" to the military parade celebrating "Oxi Day," I got to thinking about this little tractate, "The Ruins of Mega Livadi," that I wrote several years ago, when people were optimistic about the economy. Mega Livadi was the site of the 1916 Miners' Strike, a response to the terrible working conditions in the iron ore mines. Four miners were murdered for protesting and demanding an eight-hour work day. The 1916 Miners' Strike was one of the defining moments in the Greek Labor Movement and marks its inception. 

The Ruins of Mega Livadi

Port of Mega Livadi

In Mega Livadi a donkey lies in the shade of the town’s ancient plane tree. Geese honk. Hens and their chicks peck in the dust near a few cars parked in the shade. Ruined houses where miners once lived dot steep hill plunging in the port, a good port, sheltered and so deep the waters already extraordinary blue approaches black. The neo-classical villa, built by the German mine-owners decays. Patches of stucco fall away. There’s no glass in the long, elegant windows or in transoms above heavy wooden doors, though the palm trees flanking the wind entry are tall and healthy (the word for palm is phoenika, phoenix).

Villa can seen on the left.

            Next to the villa is a monument to four miners who in 1916 were shot demonstrating for higher wages and an eight-hour workday. Their names, cut in marble, are Themistoklis Kousoupis, Mihalis Zilis, Mihalis Metrofanis, and Yiannis Protopappas. Oleander blooms profusely by blazing marble. We’re dizzy in noonday sun.
      The village is quiet. Maybe there are twenty of us here. Some eating, some swimming, some fishing, some sitting with friends observing the summer day. On the terraces of the two beachfront tavernas people sit, sip ouzo and gossip. Old women wear black dresses and white headscarves. One still wears the traditional stiff sunbonnet, cardboard covered with calico. Blue, red, and yellow plastic chairs glare against whitewash while painted boats on the sea or banked on the beach upside-down under trees radiate their oranges and turquoises. Children playing in the shallow water call out to their siblings and cousins, “Come play!”—to grandmother, aunt, and mother, “Look! Look!”

Painting by Aliki

       Canaries sing from cages nailed up on either side of the taverna door. Kirea Maria watches soaps as she peels potatoes. She brings us a salad garnished with capers picked from the bushes which grow wild on the mountainside, bread baked in the island bakery’s wood-fired oven, and mizithra, the homemade goat cheese that’s sweet and sour and creamy. She has one gold tooth in her big smile and talks lovingly about her potted plants: scented geranium, jade, begonia, amaryllis, carnation, aster, crassula, vinca, basil. She directs us to the old springhouse, built by the miners for their pleasure and later damaged by an earthquake, so the thermal waters run into the sea rather than into the baths.
      The iron-ore mine gapes huge in the hillside of blooming euphorbia and yarrow; beside it a slagheap tumbles into the sea. The old technology rusts—tracks, carts lying on their sides, their wheels sometimes a few feet away, the cantilevered loading bridge reaching the port where no freight ship or ferry has docked in years.

The Cyclops, the wild, cannibalistic shepherd, imprisoned that intruder Odysseus in a cave on Serifos. And you can see his rage in these buckling tracks, upturned carts and far-flung wheels. His hands would be stained with rust, just as ours are after we pick through the slag-heap looking for the extraordinary quartz-crystal laced with red ore. But it’s so peaceful here, in spite of the monument to protest and martyrdom. Perhaps the ruin is simply ruin, and we can identify the monster, who’s one-eyed, who helps and destroys. For in a later story, the    Cyclops assisted Hephaestos, helping him make the arms, armor, and metal ornaments of the Gods.         
       Before the iron-ore mines in Mega Livadi closed, twenty-five thousand people lived on Serifos. Now there are eight-hundred year-round residents, though in summer, on the other side of the island, Livadi, the harbor village, and Hora, the mountain village above it, are packed with near-naked Athenians and Europeans eating, drinking, swimming, sleeping in the sand, wandering the maze of flagstone streets. So in a country where they say everything happens late, new hotels and restaurants go up rapidly and cover the austere mountains.

       In 1987 we celebrated the first gas station on Serifos with a panayiri, we ate a feast at long tables. Musicians played and we danced between the pumps. Until the gas station opened, you had to get gas from Halidas, the storeowner who used to be the richest man on the island. You had to know the village and you had to know Greek. Now they’ve opened a rent-a-car and a rent-a-bike. They transformed donkey paths to roads and built condominiums beside them. The beaches we used to hike to on special occasions are crowded with tourists talking on cell phones.

     Imagine it. When the ferry arrives, a mini-van stenciled with HOTEL MEGA LIVADI waits to take you to the newly renovated villa where each room has a bath, a phone, and a refrigerator. You walk ten steps to the beach. You explore the old mine shafts and dig crystals from the walls. You hike high, well-marked paths by the sea, pay a small fee, enter the restored springhouse, soak in warm curative waters, then cool off in the sea. You meet the same woman we met today, a smiling woman wearing a flying-nun sunbonnet and herding her goats over ruined railroad tracks. She calls out, “Kalimera!” (good day!). She asks questions and approves each of the answers you give in faltering Greek with “Bravo!” She wishes you a good road and a good trip, then climbs to high rock to watch her herd and look out to sea, same as the ancients.

Painting by Aliki