ADRIFT

by Pilar Saavedra-Vela

The Greek coastguard has caused the deaths of dozens of migrants in the Mediterranean over a three-year period, witnesses say, including nine who were deliberately thrown into the water. The nine are among more than 40 people alleged to have died as a result of being forced out of Greek territorial waters, or taken back out to sea after reaching Greek islands, BBC analysis has found. The Greek coastguard told our investigation it strongly rejects all accusations of illegal activities. We showed footage of 12 people being loaded into a Greek coastguard boat, and then abandoned on a dinghy, to a former senior Greek coastguard officer. When he got up from his chair, and with his mic still on, he said it was "obviously illegal" and "an international crime.” —BBC, June 17, 2024

In myths of Greece

the ancients were supremely

cruel. Prometheus, chained

to a pillar, an eagle

will pick at  his liver forever.

 

King Acricius, on hearing

prophesy of his death,

set his own daughter

Danae and her child adrift

in the sea—the child  Perseus

survives and one day

will slay his grandfather king.

 

In modern Greek seas

ancient cruelties surge and seethe:

boats full of emigrants

from the war-torn Middle East

risk the Mediterranean

to seek refuge, a new European life.

 

From the shores, Coast Guards

have been filmed

forcing immigrant mothers

and children, and men,

onto rubber dinghies,

tugging them out to sea,

setting them adrift.

 

A new Perseus might be

from Iran or Syria, or

Afghanistan.

He might survive:

he might one day

kill the sailors who,

sent to save him,

instead set him

and his mother adrift.

Pilar Saavedra-Vela has lived in Costa Rica for 37 years. Born in Colombia, she grew up in the DC area, where she returns almost every year. A translator, editor and hotel owner, she has been writing poetry since 2006 (she composed poetry earlier, just didn't write it down). She has had poems published in The New Verse News and Passager.

SOME MEMORIES OF THE QATAR GAMES

by Sister Lou Ella Hickman, I.W.B.S.

A woman holds up sign reading Woman Life Freedom, prior to the World Cup group B soccer match between England and Iran at the Khalifa International Stadium in in Doha, Qatar, Nov. 21, 2022. (AP Photo/Alessandra Tarantino)

armbands 
hands covering mouths 
wales a flag 
a falling star 
silent voices for a national song 
(did you know the team and their families were threatened) 
silence for a dead lady 
signs for “Women, Life, Freedom”  
“no politics in sports” the cry
yet politiká in greece where sports also ruled 
a word for a network and affairs of the cities 
a small world if you will 
our world now 
in a game 
where the boundaries of freedom’s speech 
end and begin 
now  
who will speak for those who died building 

Sister Lou Ella has a master’s in theology from St. Mary’s University in San Antonio and is a former teacher and librarian. She is a certified spiritual director as well as a poet and writer.  Her poems have appeared in numerous magazines such as America, First Things, Emmanuel, Third Wednesday, and The New Verse News as well as in four anthologies: The Night’s Magician: Poems about the Moon, edited by Philip Kolin and Sue Brannan Walker, Down to the Dark River edited by Philip Kolin, Secrets edited by Sue Brannan Walker and After Shocks: The Poetry of Recovery for Life-Shattering Events edited by Tom Lombardo. She was nominated for the Pushcart Prize in 2017 and in 2020. Her first book of poetry entitled she: robed and wordless was published in 2015 (Press 53.) On May 11, 2021, five poems from her book which had been set to music by James Lee III were performed by the opera star Susanna Phillips, star clarinetist Anthony McGill, pianist Mayra Huang at the 92nd Street Y in New York City. The group of songs is entitled “Chavah’s Daughters Speak.”

THE WARRIOR'S GRAVE

by Alejandro Escudé

This 3,500-Year-Old Greek Tomb Upended What We Thought We Knew About the Roots of Western Civilization: The recent discovery of the grave of an ancient soldier is challenging accepted wisdom among archaeologists. In late June 2015, the scheduled end to their season came and went, and a skeleton began to emerge—a man in his early 30s, his skull flattened and broken and a silver bowl on his chest. The researchers nicknamed him the “griffin warrior” after a griffin-decorated ivory plaque they found between his legs. Stocker got used to working alongside him in that cramped space, day after day in the blazing summer sun. “I felt really close to this guy, whoever he was,” she says. “This was a person and these were his things. I talked to him: ‘Mr. Griffin, help me to be careful.’” —Smithsonian, January 2017

The mouth grows
isolation

under the olive groves
a warrior waits

gold-laden, bronze statuettes,
oh rings double-scored

and you mount the Mount
to be with her;

she who knew you best
and whom you challenged,

as far as mainland Greece,
across the lunar bay

and into the ancient palace
of words

death finally made you a poet
as it does to us all.

Alejandro Escudé published his first full-length collection of poems My Earthbound Eye in September 2013. He holds a master’s degree in creative writing from UC Davis and teaches high school English. Originally from Argentina, Alejandro lives in Los Angeles with his wife and two children.

TERROR IN ATHENS

by Howard Winn

ATHENS, Ohio — A Hocking County gun shop owner may have prevented a mass shooting at Ohio University in Athens, authorities said. John Downs, owner of a Logan gun shop, refused to sell a gun to 25-year-old James Howard. Howard passed a background check, but he made statements that indicated he may want to harm himself or others. “There was a red flag for me," Downs told ABC 6. "I won't allow that; I don't want that to be on me." Howard left the store angry after Downs refused to sell him a long gun. When Howard returned to the store more than an hour later, Downs hid his customers in a backroom, locked the store, and called 911. Police later arrested Howard at a nearby Walmart. He was buying camouflage clothing, gloves, and ammunition. Police found a .22-caliber rifle and mental health paperwork inside Howard's car. Authorities said Howard had purchased another weapon at an Athens gun store. "Apparently he was frustrated about something that happened at OU in Athens," Hocking County Sheriff Lanny North told ABC 6. "I believe [Downs] did prevent a mass shooting that was probably going to occur at Ohio University in Athens." . . . Howard is a former Ohio University student and hockey player. —Cleveland.com, March 27, 2016. Image source: WBNS-TV.

No, not Greece, although it has
its share of terror both literal
and economic as Europe runs
amuck with collapsing economies
and murderers hiding in the
crowds of pathetic refugees
from war and other horrors.
It is actually domestic again
this time berserk athletic
response to humiliation of
a college hockey player whose
notion of self-worth depends
on the macho role of male
games which are not played
for fun but for fame and bucks
so the terror is part of Ohio
in the middle of America where
sports serve for our religion as
does the demoniac god of the
middle east some place with
no compassion outside of the
fearsome faith retrieved from
selected images out of the past
but in Ohio one can purchase
the tools of revenge at your
local big box store where
everything is for sale including
human conscience and scruples
and the necessity to kill can be
satisfied with just the swipe
of the modern credit card.

Howard Winn's work has been published in Dalhousie Review, The Long Story, Galway Review, Descant.  Antigonish Review, Straylight Literary Magazine, The Main Street Rag, Wisconsin Review, Harbinger Asylum, The 3288 Review, Stand, and Blueline. He has a novel being published in July 2016 by Propertius Press. His B. A. is from Vassar College. His M. A. is from the Stanford University Creative Writing Program and his doctoral work was done at N. Y. U. He is Professor of English at SUNY.

THE LAST SURVIVOR

by Lisa Suhair Majaj

A tent in Idomeni Camp. Image source: Cyprus Refugee Solidarity, March 16, 2016

                                    “Hope is a tough bitch to kill.” —Faye Karavasili, Cyprus Refugee Solidarity

They trudge through rain and mud, their wrecked shoes
and sodden clothes a testament to everything broken,
lives reduced to rubble like the shattered hulls
of homes they left behind. Ahead lie footsore roads,
barbed wire,grim officials thrusting the press of bodies back
and back, floodwater rising on all sides, relentless
as the memories that pursue them no matter how far
they walk, heads bent beneath the rain, children clinging
to a parent’s back or borne on a weary shoulder,
a small hand in a larger hand, a long column of people
trekking weary, undeterred, from bone-chilled morn
to damp, cold dusk, snatching sleep in cramped tents
or open fields where they wait for dawn, for refuge,
for a border opening. But dawn comes each morning
with its orange refusal: rain, closed borders, stolen dreams.

The desperate do not give up. They escape to illegal crossings,
wade into swiftly-flowing rivers, pass babies and toddlers
hand to hand in a human chain, threading the cloth of desolation
with a thin gleam of hope, even as muddy currents sweep away
the unlucky, the overly-weary. Their goal?
The future, the other bank, a chance to keep on walking.

In Idomeni camp, illness and despair permeate
everything: the sucking mud, the weighted sky,
the grim and cheerless air. A Yazidi child
peers out from a torn and tiny tent,
her face a bright beacon amid the gloom and muck.
She begs for a balloon, but there are no balloons
to be had here, only sodden rags that hang
from trees and tent poles – limp flags
that have long ago given up the dream of flying.
Yet at her plea something bright and colorful
rises wisp-like in the dank, cold air,
floating improbably above the tent-city
pitched on the razor-edge between despair and hope.

The mother smiles as she gently strokes
her daughter’s hair. “How can you smile?”
an aide worker asks, "amid all this?"
The mother pauses, then replies.  “They wanted
to chop her hand off for offending the faith.
Here, no one wants to chop off our hands or heads.
We can be free.” She speaks calmly, her eyes seeking
the gray horizon. Behind her, ghosts murmur,
their soft keening an echoing whisper
in the darkening sky, rising above this graveyard of dreams
where hope is the last survivor.


Lisa Suhair Majaj is the author of Geographies of Light, winner of the Del Sol Press Poetry Prize. She lives in Cyprus. This poem responds to the refugee crisis in Greece, particularly at Idomeni camp.

SEARCHING WORDS FOR IT

by Cally Conan-Davies

Getty image via DW.

English. It isn’t all Greek. But a lot of it is,
maybe 60%, or more in the sciences.
But let’s not put a figure on it. Today
I’m thinking about the word ‘ecology’.
Basically, it’s your house, oikos. Unfortunately,
if that gets bombed, and you have to move away,

and there may not be a mother or a father or a door
about which a mother or father might say
‘were you born in a tent?’
to shame you every time you forget to shut it,
you must strive, especially when your new tongue is unstable,
to explain how your life is a ‘very high degree of miserable’
now that you shave the hair of your child for nits,
the child by the wire fence too tired to cry,
now that you wait and live in mud and shit
and the cold, quiet child is innocent,
and the settled world you seek is unsettling.


Cally Conan-Davies is a writer who lives by the sea.

DOORS IN THE EYES OF A REFUGEE CHILD

by Debasis Mukhopadhyay

Image source: Provence Today

Doors break loose during transit
They lie scattered across the hills and rivers
Their edges drown in the map
I wait until the ripples turn me out into the street

At times I am old enough to chase them like fireflies
And when I crawl into my dreams
Leaving out the hard parts of travel
Doors smolder crying softly
You are home

Morning brings me back to the waters
And our boat churns its way once more
I keep thinking

How to rip them out of the map


Debasis Mukhopadhyay lives & writes in Montreal. Recent poems have appeared in The Curly Mind, Yellow Chair Review, Thirteen Myna Birds, Of/With, I am not a silent poet, With Painted Words, Silver Birch Press, Foliate Oak, The Bitchin’ Kitsch, Snapping Twig, Eunoia Review, Revolution John, Down in the Dirt, and elsewhere. @dbasis_m

ALL THE CHILDREN

by Cally Conan-Davies

At least 25 refugees, including 10 children, drowned in the Aegean on Thursday when their boat sank off the coast of the Greek island of Samos. The refugees were trying to reach the island from the coast of Turkey, just a few miles away, when the vessel went down. It was not known what caused the accident, but there have been dozens of similar tragedies in recent months, caused by people traffickers cramming too many refugees onto small boats. The Greek coast guard said that of the drowned children, five were boys and five girls. Ten survivors were rescued. —The Telegraph, Jan. 28, 2016. AP Photo Coast guard vessel arrives with the dead bodies of migrants at the port of Vathi on the eastern Greek island of Samos.

Out of the water,
his small ear
to the air—

we saw the photos,
froze,
outrage spilled over.

But in real time, the mean time,

eyes dry and tides change
yet the children of nowhere
keep dying on the waves

not over there
for there is no there but here
and no them but us
dying

in their wet clothes.


Cally Conan-Davies is a writer who lives by the sea.

CHARON

Editor's Note: We are pleased to repost this poem, originally published in TheNewVerse.News on Sunday, September 27, 2015. It is one of our 2015 Pushcart Prize nominees.


CHARON
by A.E. Stallings

A Syrian refugee carries his child at a beach on the Greek island of Lesbos after crossing part of the Aegean Sea from the Turkish coast, September 19, 2015. A girl believed to be five years died on Saturday and 13 other migrants were feared lost overboard after their boat sank in choppy seas off the Greek island of Lesbos, the Greek coastguard said. A second, exhausted group of around 40 people reached the island in a small boat following a traumatic journey from Turkey, having paddled through the night with their hands across 10 kilometers (six miles) of ocean after their engine failed. Hundreds of thousands of mainly Syrian refugees have braved the short but precarious crossing from Turkey to Greece's eastern islands this year, mainly in flimsy and overcrowded inflatable boats. —REUTERS/Yannis Behrakis via Yahoo! News, September 15, 2015

When some, as promised, made it to dry land,
He profited, high and dry, but others, owing
To fickle winds, or a puncture, or freak waves,
Arrived at a farther shore, another beach
Lapped by a numb forgetting, still in the clothes
Someone had washed and pressed to face the day,
And lay in attitudes much like repose.
And Charon made a killing either way,
Per child alone, 600 euros each.


A.E. Stallings is an American poet who has lived in Greece since 1999. Her most recent collection is Olives, from TriQuarterly/Northwestern University Press.

CHARON

by A.E. Stallings

A Syrian refugee carries his child at a beach on the Greek island of Lesbos after crossing part of the Aegean Sea from the Turkish coast, September 19, 2015. A girl believed to be five years died on Saturday and 13 other migrants were feared lost overboard after their boat sank in choppy seas off the Greek island of Lesbos, the Greek coastguard said. A second, exhausted group of around 40 people reached the island in a small boat following a traumatic journey from Turkey, having paddled through the night with their hands across 10 kilometers (six miles) of ocean after their engine failed. Hundreds of thousands of mainly Syrian refugees have braved the short but precarious crossing from Turkey to Greece's eastern islands this year, mainly in flimsy and overcrowded inflatable boats. —REUTERS/Yannis Behrakis via Yahoo! News, September 15, 2015

When some, as promised, made it to dry land,
He profited, high and dry, but others, owing
To fickle winds, or a puncture, or freak waves,
Arrived at a farther shore, another beach
Lapped by a numb forgetting, still in the clothes
Someone had washed and pressed to face the day,
And lay in attitudes much like repose.
And Charon made a killing either way,
Per child alone, 600 euros each.


A.E. Stallings is an American poet who has lived in Greece since 1999. Her most recent collection is Olives, from TriQuarterly/Northwestern University Press.

INK THREATS

by B.Z. Niditch

A series of demonstrations concerning the anti-fascist hip-hop artist, Pavlos Fyssas’ murder by Giorgos Roupakias, supporter of the Greek political neo-Nazi party Golden Dawn, are organized in European capitals by Greek immigrants and local left-winged organizations and students. - Greek Reporter         Meanwhile, mass protests against police abuses have resumed in the Turkish city of Istanbul, as well as in Ankara, the national capital, and in Antakya province on the Syrian border. The latest country-wide demonstrations began after the death on September 10 of Ahmet Atakan, a male aged 22, in Antakya. -- Gatestone Institute

Because poems
touch your faraway eye
and dictators
flee from word memory
silence cannot conceal us
from any occupying justice
our initials in blood
rise on city graffiti walls
over roofs and presses
others are written
with bark of hundred years
on old trees,
whether in Turkey or Greece
or anywhere on headlines
we hear impure speech
of the general staffs
who wage war
against people
even in nuclear times
only with ink threats
of our pens
can fascism be exposed
and die off.


B.Z. Niditch is a poet, playwright, fiction writer and teacher. His work is widely published in journals and magazines throughout the world, including: Columbia: A Magazine of Poetry and Art; The Literary Review; Denver Quarterly; Hawaii Review; LeGuepard (France); Kadmos (France); Prism International; Jejune (Czech Republic); Leopold Bloom (Budapest); Antioch Review; and Prairie Schooner, among others. He lives in Brookline, Massachusetts.

KOMMENO

by Janice D. Soderling

On August 16, 1943, the Greek village of Kommeno was destroyed, and one hundred fifty villagers massacred. 74 were children under the age of 10. Photo source: Kommeno. A narrative reconstruction of a war crime committed by the Wehrmacht in Greece.

Always they are with us in this room
watching as we laugh or write or rest.
Some never learned to speak. Like vaporous spume
they drift, small shades: dry-eyed, perplexed, distressed.
Months pass, and years, and decades, still they wait
for honest news, and even the littlest
ones keep watch. Men who exterminate
small babes like rats must surely have good cause.
One day, one may drop by to motivate
the deed—mistake or joke or small-print clause?
The little sprites want only to know why
they had to die.


Janice D. Soderling has often had poems at NVN. She is a poet, writer and translator whose work can be read in many print and online magazines and anthologies.

A GREEK TRAGEDY

by BZ Niditch

Yannis Ritsos (Photo source: http://mhsteger.tumblr.com/)

Even the ancients
would be surprised
when news had
to be whispered
by great old trees
outside captive cities
of knowledge
and you can no longer
listen in
to debate issues
in Athens
of all places,
it leaves us breathless,
that one quiet day
there is silence
by the news waves
on your beautiful side
of the sea,
for it is to language
we turn when rising up
at the amazing sun
with our eyes open,
to comprehend
what this portends,
not since Yannis Ritsos
your great poet
had read his poem
"Epitaphios"
publicly out loud
at the Temple of Zeus
in that dark day in 1936
speaking for the worker
murdered by Mataxas
and his work banned
when life was unveiled
and were exiled to Lemnos,
and then Yannis,
imprisoned and exiled
during the military junta
spoke again to us
from islands of forceful
words in Gyaros
and you made dictatorship
and censorship uncomfortable
to the democratic world,
rise up again partisans,
remember Ritsos
who stands with you
wanting to hear
the latest news
occupying your mind
defying all attempts
at these fresh outbreaks
against all democratic souls,
speak again Yannis Ritsos
to us, and like before
public opinion will rally
by the Temple of Zeus
and only fascism will die.


BZ Niditch's latest international poetry appears in the Alembic, Outlaw Poetry, Vscorpiozine, Exercise Bowler, Third Wednesday, Dead Snakes, Prairie Winds, Big Hammer, Main Street Rag, Epiphany, London Grip.