During their ancient traditional afternoon break
Greece is riveted to subtitled american soaps
Never saw so many lemon, orange, & olive trees
Azure waters white houses red tile roofs
Sheep craggy aretes, ten thousand postcards
Old urns romantic poets oded
The beehive tomb of Agamemnon at Mycenae
place where he was by his lover
death stabbed
High fortresses on the rugged dry tors
where I relive Persian invasions
But what in all Greece impressed me most?
The labor & size of the great canal of Corinth
The Calcutta-like poverty of the Gypsies
living by the dumps in Patras
But most of all the pious devotion
of those faces glued to
“As The World Turns”
Patras, Greece, 1990
In: 40th Centrury Man, Selected Verse 1996-1966, Autonomedia, 1997.