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  • I Want To Be Buried in Chafteía
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I Want To Be Buried in Chafteía

Michalis Ghanas

Posters are tugging me by the sleeve,
Athens my town with all your beauty contests.
I want to be buried in Chafteía;
twenty years I’ve been paying you rent, I have.

In my sleep, mountains and forests pass,
fairies swaddled up in mourning black.
The mulish grudge that I once had against you,
I’ve come to lose it – but on what bus?

What madness, tell me, beats me at the heel
and off I go, rolling like a ball,
the mute football grounds and the tavérnes

deep in my bowels? The people and the places –
strangers who look just like the photographs
we used to take of our younger faces.


Michalis Ghanas

from A Century of Greek Poetry 1900–2000, edited by Bien, Constantine, Keeley and Van Dyck (New York: Cosmos, 2004)

translated by David Ricks

Reproduced by kind permission of the author.

Tags:

Greek identity memory nationalism sonnets

About this poem

This poem, representing Greece, is part of The Written World – our collaboration with BBC radio to broadcast a poem from every single nation competing in London 2012.

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