Sample Poems by Theresa Pappaas

Return to the Island

Last year the daily life
here was a haze of gifts, women
in black always
standing at the doorway
pressing things into my hands.
One Anna with honey, the other
with figs. So much fruit
my room steeped
in thick odors, a physical
presence. I had to sneak
to the trash bin. I couldn’t
eat everything they gave me.
And I believed in the wonder
of this arrangement. Houses
separated only by narrow
passages. The ritual
greetings for morning, evening,
and night. A man lowering
handfuls of grapes from a ladder.

But this summer—now that I know
some words and the children
have learned more English—I hear
about the feuding
between the two Annas.
They haven’t spoken
for years. Each Anna tends
the borders of her own
tiny plot, just yards
from the other Anna’s door.
Their neighbors recount
the fight, wild pantomime
replacing language
I can’t follow, until finally
I see: a land dispute,
a court scene, even
some violence, hairpulling.

Later, when I ask the younger,
voluptuous Anna why
they won’t speak,
she offers only that slow Greek shrug.
The old Anna repeats the chant
I heard last year but didn’t understand:

Tina kanoume?  What can we do?
Her husband was a drunk,
the neighbors whisper.
I’ve seen his picture
over the fireplace, brooding
among the crockery. I remember
Anna’s hand upon her heart, tears
shrouding her eyes as she spoke his name,
but the children say she nagged,
that just before he died, she beat him
with a broom, ashamed of the way
he staggered home each night.

Now the neighbors call
from their windows and ask me
inside. They pour a dense,
black coffee. They tell me more.
 

Mythology

Don’t trust what you see here.
Don’t trust other versions of the story,
don’t trust your own.
The maps don’t match the ruins.
The sea isn’t as blue as the postcards
you’re mailing home.
A native will say, “We are a friendly people,”
while you see only faces closed and stony
as the walls you ride out to tour.


Or else, trust it all.  Believe
everything, without reservation,
even though it wasn’t what you expected,
what you counted on when you made your plans,
so long ago it seems. Give yourself
over to the collusion
between your dreams and this
landscape, the joining
of your desires and the lies, the lies
these people love to tell you.

Calling Their Names

“You must move your lips,” our teacher
says. “You must feel all
of the word.” So many imperatives,
here in Athens, springtime.
After hours of class, we hurtle
through streets, down the steep hill
past the Stadium. Along the trails
of the National Gardens, we babble
phrases she drilled today, drunk
with the syllables melting on our tongues.

We yell at vendors, hail strangers,
demanding directions or details
of their personal lives, adding the shrugs
and obscene gestures to our lexicon.
In the terrace restaurant, we call
each other Melina and Sofia
and Dimitri, names our teacher
gave us. Our voices, too loud, climb
the encircling walls as though
rippling from the bottom of a well.
We open the menu, saying avgolemono,
psomi, bira, relishing the braided sounds
and the waiter’s bored notations.
He understands, though our own voices
are strange to us, so funny
we can’t help mimicking
Mexican drawl and Belgian formality,
my American clumsiness
and the Australian’s reckless twang.

Later, on the streets again,
we see Kato, the Japanese man
who disappeared after the first week
of class. Kato, Kato, Kato, we call,
laughing because his name is a Greek word too.
In the middle of Syntagma’s broad crosswalk,
he turns to regard us, and when he bows low
ignoring lights and cars, we believe
he simply honors the rules
he has evaded, the ones we must obey—
moving our lips and feeling every word.
We all bow back to him from the curb.

Proto Aeroplano

From this height, the white geometry
collapses, a pond of icy light
where the steep town climbs.
The pilot sweeps grandly above the landscape,
while the television crew props cameras
against the windows. We didn’t know,
when we booked this flight, that we’d be
on the first airplane. We didn’t expect
to find everyone—the entire island—there,
waiting at the end of the runway.
First tourists to arrive by air—
just six of us—we disembark,
gripping our belongings and wondering
where to go. We can’t get a taxi into town
until the ceremonies are over. A priest
chants and disperses incense. Some women
make the sign of the cross. Others move about
with small trays—honeyed pastries, glasses
of ouzo. An important man gives a speech
about the island’s future, its beautiful future.
Then, in dresses and scarves unfolded
from wooden trunks, the girls
file onto the runway, hands upon
each other’s waists. Red and yellow,
black and white. Their costumes
braid ribbons of these colors.
Behind their solemn dance, the plane vibrates
against the sun as if in flight.
Old men and small boys, women
with their sleeping babies. All of them
watch, thinking of what the aircraft
will bring—how much they want
and how much they want to change.