I Want To Be Buried in Chafteía

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.