Notes on Summer Tree Care Days
The wind stopped. The sea hid in the courtyard well. We removed furniture from all rooms that received lightning.
We untied the tiles from the roof and our dreams began to get wet.
The cypresses, the lemon trees, a rough walnut, the eucalyptus bent in solitude, as the fireman’s chainsaw chewed them. The ageless and mythless flames disturbed the silence of the occupants.
We put on our holiday clothes and got into the car.
The two cats and the white-haired dog were frightened, as the branches were broken by the pressure of the water.
We hugged them – immigrants and those in the same city, in the same country, in the same homeland.
It began to get dark, we filled the buckets with water, hung them up there to be cooled by the moon.
They were giving us death instructions over the radio.
We heard first the roof fall in and then the sea howling as it sloshed into the well. Of the living, only the canary forgotten in the north that was painted in the hall and of our valuables, the last Bible engraved by Gutenberg with the same ink he printed and the national anthem of the country that crawls in the shadows of the mysteries of the great week, were lost.
After all, in the summers, native and non-native Greeks ruin their houses. Without obituaries, without the verbs of Romanos the melodious, without the exercises of Emmanuel Hatzidakis, without the resistance of Michael Theodorakis. So we too will perish as exiles, restless in a raft with the planks of Pantantannas, with a torn flag open in the sea of Kythira.
Early morning of August 13, 2024
Athens again in flames.
Antonis D Skiathas
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