Forbearers

 

With hand and foot they built this land

Bleeding palm on chipped rock, they carved these steppes

Dusty sole treading silently up narrow paths

The sea behind, and only dust rock sky ahead

 

Some heaved and groaned and pulled

Fish from blue waters

Fingers chafing on worn lines and canvas sails

Watching their flopping pray die upon the wooden deck

 

There were constants with all, holding them tight

In their gods’ hands

Backbreaking work that dulled the soul like a knife

Upon the rock of mountains

 

Salt lay heavy in their hair and in scales upon their backs

Eyes grew blotchy from uncaring sun, lips red from cheap wine

Pipe smoke and anchovies in small houses

Blackened from sun like those who lived there

 

Women, waiting in mock silence, necks like trucks of olive trees

Brown and twisted from carrying pots

Of oil along the polished stones of the shore

While seagulls cried and children wept at being left alone

 

They would sit in black on bleached slate

Palms of hands there to speak

Days of labour on the nets, the scars still present

The same palms to bury a husband, rear a child

End a life or bring one screaming, into the world

 

Now where are they? These men with bent backs

And women with hard faces

Buried in unforgiving rock or lost,

in unforgiving sea

 

 

We sit now in that square, drink coffee by well-fed dogs

And Germans clutching tourist maps, children throwing sand

Locals selling trinkets in whitewashed shops with bright awnings

These, decedents of the  men with bent backs and women with hard faces

 

Faded photographs of their fathers long past, stacked quietly in a drawer

Do the children of these faded photographic figures

Sit on sofas with dogs and T.V, wondering quietly

who built these hills and planted trees?