John Stocks
Another Cretan Paradox
And so it begins
Like some strange, long dreamed of day
Of cloudless skies, soaring eagles.
The old men, sat outside Tavernas, say nothing
Black-robed women squatting in the sun
Put down their needlework and stare at you.
How close to perfection, this village of mysteries
Where lemons are ripe, glistening in early May?
With its haunting folk music and Minoan mosaics.
With its light so infinitely malleable,
To highlight each nuance, each intricate detail,
Of the tiny, tremulous toadflax that flourishes,
In crumbling crevices of a Byzantine wall.
Or the solitary orchid, standing proud
In the long meadow of endlessly rolling green.
And, it his here, that I take your hand and wonder,
If a man who, by his own admission,
Has never known true love
Could find that valediction here.
On Falling in Love with the Girl in the Painting
Here is the pose, the chosen moment
The flash of languid insouciance.
Her sapphire-blue eyes so beguiling
And pale cream breasts that will slowly rise
Then fall, under the artist’s entrapment.
And could we perhaps have been lovers?
This girl whose thoughts are always ghosted
Encrypted within the artist’s stroke.
Hand on hip, for all eternity,
Her bourgeois life-style, her restless eyes,
Her ringlets, curves, all immortalized.
A brief, too transient inspiration
A mystery to her self and others.
Tainted
Let us walk where the street fox slinks away,
To serrated bin bags, chicken scraps
With the detritus of the ebbing day
For we are tainted too, and we belong here.
And let us embrace the bleak harmony
Somewhere, far north of my half frozen soul
The edginess the parsimony
Where sociopaths and outsiders roam.
Then skulk down some bleak gennel that we know
And pass the girl with the film-noire face,
Half-dead eyes, last cigarette burning low,
Oblivious to the slanting rain.
Where we might stop and sadly speculate
Whether anyone will ever
Buy her flowers?
Or cherish the sound of her name?
