Women of Kefalos

The April sunshine draws them
from behind crochet-framed windows,
past red tins of basil
onto lozenges of porch,
where shrewd birdlike eyes
take in the sandy street,
white windmills, and blue beehives
set in yellow fields like tiles.

They settle with the solid air
of turkey hens or ravens -
drinking the residue
of many winters, many springs -
not holding mirrors as they comb
their dark metallic hair,
not singing songs of myth and fantasy,
not dreaming of the fishermen
and sponge-divers in caiques,
but sitting thickly in a cage of veins.

Their heavy-stockinged legs
make no concession to the season;
village women's hearts
speak through their hands -
below a row of shapeless
garments on a line, a grandmother
embroiders voluptuous red flowers;
a monochrome of lacy filigree
flows inconceivably from silent fingers.

Looking at their eyes, I see
no traces of Persephone, no inkling
of that daughter of the spring
who used to dwell in them.
Demeter is a poor, senescent
hag who lives in Kefalos,
or else she is a widow,
or a wife with calculating gaze
that avidly reacts, not
to the flowers of the meadow,
but to the season's spectacle
of wayfarers in jeans.



The village of Kefalos, on the Aegean island of Kos, was associated in antiquity with a cult centre of Demeter, goddess of the corn-bearing earth and of agriculture, and of settled family life.