Poet: Anastasia Tsanousidou Mataragga

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I'm climbing up their stairs.
To a house they built with their own hands
for generations before and after theirs.
Ahead even of me.

I open their door, unlocked.
"We don't lock here, why should we?"

I’m bringing my grief with me,
along with my dead.
The whole house smells like those two.
The smell of a home that will never come back.

I climb the outside stairs to the bedrooms.
"All the houses here are just like this, this is how we built them."

Mosaic floor, shades of pink,
with chips of marble, white, green, brown.

White railings,
with many layers of plastic paint on them.

We painted them together once or twice.

I open the door and walk straight into their room.
I'm tired.
I carry with me trunks, travelers, train rails, our dead,
and our entire lineage.
Generations of wounds, sores and arrows.

I know this room by heart.
On which step the floor creaks.
And how the north wind whistles through the window,
which is wooden and thin, like her elbows.

Her elbows, two dimples in the marble
waiting for me to return.
From the preschool, from the university, from abroad.

I return home with my arrows,
my soldier’s boots muddy,
my wounds licked by wolves.

On the top of their huge wooden wardrobe
there are suitcases full of photos of births, baptisms, weddings, trips, farms.

Him younger—in front of the Brandenburg Gate—winter, before the fall of the Wall.
A Protector.

She—bride—sitting on the terrace,
on the flowerbed beside the tulips.
Tulips… who knew!
A golden deer.

The walls are white.
On one alone hung, honorably, the Pontian soldier.
Tired like me, and his moustache, remaining black within the centuries.
His khaki uniform’s faded, but it still clothe him.

A little poem underneath and two roses.
A wooden bed, a double bed,
two wooden bedside tables with blood pressure pills in their drawers.

On one, a frame with three little children, happy and smiling.
Blue velvet.

On the other, a CASIO alarm clock, Made in Taiwan, just this.
Black plastic.

Both with a white embroidered chemise,
like the bed-sheets and the curtains.
The pillowcases have their initials embroidered on them
by golden and eternal thread.
A and G.

I'm tired and I'm looking for her side.
According to name and surname.
I know which one it is,
but I'm still looking for it,
and it doesn't matter what I know or don't know.

I bring with me dust, dirt, salt and a cross.
I am so tired and I look for her
in every taste, smell that will remind me of her.
And I look for him in every dark brown haired man with wheat skin,
in every whiskey sip I take.

I lie down on her side.
I look into the photo-frame of three little, happy, smiling children.
I barely recognize us.
Now we have two little one’s of our own.

I lie on her side, wrapped up in her brown thick blanket,
on her white sheets.

I close my eyes like a little bear who made it,
into their mother's arms.

And so, I let tears, wine and lemon cologne fall
as an eternal river.