———————
Mother,
remember the lullabies
you were softly singing
taking me to Smyrna and
Salonika,
Cappadocia, and
Albania...

The empire had
high plains,
storms and rains,
had wars,
and soldiers,
but we had Janina and
Hagia Sophia.

Mother,
I went to too many places,
through cities
and mythologies.

The sea used to
swell,
the sun used to
shine
— they had nothing else to do —
while you were sitting
in the midst of your fields
counting your olive trees

then one day,
I had to go further, so
I left you the mountain,
though keeping its shadows.

———————
In Athens three days ago on a fine afternoon
a Greek friend just returned from Albania
played me
a video on his cell phone
of some Albanian music
he heard in a bar

Like bees it was on a summer’s day
one voice
 two voices,
  three
   then four
 high and low
 rough and smooth

wonderfully together in their difference vibrating

humming filling the world
faces so serious
eyes so gay holding the notes
winding in your soul

DISPLACeMENT is contagious

The students fill the café
where do they get money? I asked
from their grandmother’s pension
enough for one coffee
soon the pension will be cut

———————
We live among strangers
Everybody is a stranger
Everything is a stranger
Our own thoughts are strangers

Strangers might be helpful
Strangers might be harmful
All of them are indifferent
All of them might be indifferent

I lived as a stranger
I will die as a stranger
God if it exists is a stranger
In a world of strangers

———————
The sun had just risen over the hills of Aegina. The corner store had just opened its door when I stepped in to buy a phone card. It would be the first time I used a public phone in years.

The calendar read November 2005, well before the Crisis that has now engulfed Greece broke out. The decrepit yellow public phone was on the opposite side of the road, adjacent to overflowing garbage containers and at a junction of narrow streets connecting the delightful town with the fields on which migrant workers toiled. It was to become the junction that connected my clashing worlds.

At the telephone line’s other end, in far away Sydney, intermittent baby noises awaited. For three months the phone had become a dark corridor of irregular sounds, the harsh soundtrack to Xenia’s (my eighteen-month-old daughter’s) absence. For several minutes every day, I would be speaking into it, never quite sure to what effect, merely hoping to maintain our fading bond.

While at home, in Athens, the morning landline call to Australia divided my days, like a harsh no-man’s-land divides two nations, two realities, two imagined communities. All my other calls, the anodyne ones that came and went insipidly, involved my mobile phone. The landline’s relative cheapness, when it came to reaching the Antipodes, had given it a privileged status in my displacement, blending it seamlessly with Xenia’s mute universe.

This dark equilibrium was perturbed when I traveled to Aegina, a nearby island that was to become my second home soon after. While making my way to Aegina, on the ferry, I did not think of the daily Call. Nor did I anticipate the heterotopia awaiting me at that Aegina phone booth.

As the first night on the island began to recede, turning into a damp dawn, I slipped out of the landline-less house in search of that phone booth. It was like slipping into another world.

Exiting the corner store, phone card in hand, I joined a short queue. A Pakistani farmhand, already chatting away with his wife, and one Albanian construction worker who arrived just after me, eager to speak to his ailing mother in Shkodra. That was all. Three very different manifestations of migration in one short queue.

While I was the only “legal” migrant of the trio, and stuck out like a sore thumb, our connection was closer than the other two could imagine. After all, I was there to hear the sounds of a little one whose maternal grandparents had migrated long ago to Australia, refugees from an older version of Greece, which resembled so much the Pakistan or the Albania of today.

As I was waiting for my turn to come, I became alive with an inner tension between multiple identities:

• A former migrant to Australia, where I had lived for twelve years struggling not to acquire the mentality of a migrant
• A professor at Athens University, who frequently socialized with Greece’s rich and powerful, and who was acknowledged as an “important person” within an increasingly self-confident society that collectively treated migrants as a necessary evil—a society I was to reenter the moment my Call was complete, leaving the “other” migrants “behind”
• A father whose daughter could only be a migrant wherever she lived; in Australia as a Greek, in Greece as an Aussie, everywhere else as a Greek-Australian

I still recall the sole source of succor while in that queue: it came when I recalled the meaning of my daughter’s ancient Greek name: kindness to strangers, who in ancient times also included the refugees, the migrants, the “lost ones.”

———————
Medusas and angels of an old front door,
quarreling in a foreign tongue,
spewed up a distinguished gentleman
dragging an amputated dog.
It is dying capitalism.
I see it agonizing,
and, as I was told in my homeland,
it is blind.
Sir! Take pity on this poor creature!
It can’t stand, let alone breathe,
the leash is tied too tight!
Don’t worry, signora!
It was born tired.
Purebred.
Signora? Me? The comrade?
Eh! Here we deal with purebreds!
Once again the door spews forth,
from the purgatory of angels and medusas,
a pair of legs,
the apogee of legs.
Oh, capitalism smells good!
Pain in the chest
following the sinuously slinking blonde.
I, the comrade,
drained of wonders,
buy a gelato.
Gelato-Privato.
And here I am,
sitting on a pavement,
looking for the heart
to put inside it.

———————
“You are not from the castle, you are not from the village, you aren’t anything. Or rather, unfortunately, you are something, a stranger, a man who isn’t wanted and is in everybody’s way, a man who’s always causing trouble.”

———————
In little pain
In great pain
We shall climb this mountain

Surrounded by two despairs, yours and mine
By two horrors, yours and mine
We are not two cowards, my friend
We are not two heroes
We are two little boys
Simple as thirst
Simple as homecoming

The road to the plains is this mountain
The road to the family is this mountain
In little pain
In great pain
Just remember:
Hope is the climax of despair

In little pain
In great pain
Just remember:
Hope itself is painful
When nothing is left but hope

We shall climb this mountain.

———————
The bank has gutted itself
like an old-time samurai
practicing seppuku
and the safes’ entrails
spread through the street
giving off a scent
of scandal and catastrophe

Where could this come from
illicit gains
corruption fake currency
drug tax havens
laundering of dirty money
blackmail rigged races
or simply theft

Amid trash and paper
torn or scorched
demonetized bills
fragments of old furniture
provisions left
to molder clothes in rags
drafts of books or contracts

The rare pearl ripens
in its wasteland exile
awaiting its discoverer
who will know how to turn
the materials past due
into a talisman
for galvanizing our life




For Jacques Riby

———————
Arrive at East Croydon Station, and exit toward the New Town. The skyline is a bar chart of office blocks built speculatively in the 1960s. Lunar House can be identified by its concrete antenna—a clunky monument to the architecture of satellites and spaceships.

It was built a year after the moon landing by a reclusive developer, whose buildings were earthbound attempts to join in the space race: Apollo House, Astronaut House, Orbit House, Space House. Once they stood for the future; today they are condemned to the past.

A billboard promises, “We’re about to change your view of Croydon.” In the meantime, there is space for other futures. Behind the site hoardings are two temporary cricket nets where refugees play office workers, while they wait for their appointments.

Continue to the motorway and follow directions for the Home Office. A sign says “WARNING. People have been killed crossing here. Use the subway.”There were riots here in 2011. Now the streets are newly paved. You have arrived when you reach the large concrete security barriers.

Lunar House is the headquarters of UK Visas and Immigration, and the largest Visa Premium Service Centre in Britain. People from all over the world pass through Croydon. This is Britain’s front door.

———————
“It’s over, admit it. That way everything will be out in the open and we’ll know what to do. It’s enough to know what we want. Isn’t that so? Answer me. Isn’t that right?”