Call me Yorgos
On April 8, 1820, a farmer named Yorgos
Kentrotas came across the statue in pieces near the ruins of an ancient city on
the island of Milos (formerly known as Melos). Some say the peasant’s name
was Yorgos Bottonis and that he and his son Antonio were poking around in the walls of the city
when they found a niche containing several fragments of ancient statuary,
That’s right, call me Yorgos,
or perhaps George,
Or whatever, it has always
been that way,
My father and his father,
too, all of them,
As far back as anyone can
remember, and give
Or take a century or a
millennium.
We have always lived here,
ploughed the fields, one ox
Or another, always the
same. Two hundred years
Ago or perhaps two thousand,
I was here.
Call me Yorgos. The sailors come and ask
For treasures, so we save
them when we can, though
Sometimes there were those
who dragged
The statues to their kilns
for limestone, and when
The ground shudders, as it
does from time to time,
The caves and niches
disappear. So we forget,
Until the day comes, as it
did to my grandfather’s grandfather,
And the bullock stumbled near
the wall. Then Yorgos
Pushed aside some earth,
peered in, and saw the face
Looking back at him, that
woman, whom
The French sailor said was
Aphrodite,
A pagan whore, no doubt, but
he would pay
To own her, so we dug her
out, with all those
Other pieces. What use was she to us,
Without her arms or
legs? He made us look
Again, and we sold him other
limbs and faces.
After he sailed away, another
Yorgos, read
In a book, and there she
was,, our broken statue
In a photo, standing in the
city of the French.
They called her Venus from
our island, Milos.
Because we have so many apple
trees.
That is my mother’s
grandmother’s face, he said,
And perhaps her ancestor as
well, one century
Or another, their faces
always return to us.
She was no whore, then? Like
our names, the same,
Even after a thousand
centuries.
The Frenchmen come, the
Germans, the English, too,
And ask if we have more like
her, this woman
Without arms or legs but with
a face we know too well.
Yorgos, they say, do you know
who made this statue?
Yorgos says, as he always
does, we have all
Forgotten, and we only find
these stones by chance
When we go into the stony
fields with our ploughs and oxen.
But that is not true, I know,
I tell myself,
Yorgos to Yorgos. They are always there to be found.
Two hundred years ago or a
thousand, no matter.
We were here before the
Athenians and the Spartans,
Long before their Phidiases and Praxiteles,
Before there were sailors on
the winedark seas.
We grew up out of the earth,
like sterile stones,
Until the sun warmed our
hearts into life
And the faces of our mothers
smiled on us.
And when we died, we sank
back into the earth
Without dreams or memories.
Our limbs
Fall off, our faces fade, our
hearts turn cold .
The apple trees blossom and
die. Their fruit
Sinks into the fertile
fields, time out of mind.
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