Donna J. Gelagotis Lee

In Pétra

the black shadows of women
pass. I cannot tell
if they are the shadows of ancestors
or the women who live in the small
white-washed houses along
the village road that runs
down the coast and then branches
off through the square to
scurry up the mountain. The
houses rise up like houseplants
slowly growing and extending
their reach up and down the path
to spread out over its dirt
or cobblestone, houses that cast
shadows, long, hard shadows,
deliberate and unforgiving. I peer around
their corners and catch a glimpse
of a woman lowering the latch
of her gate, wild flowers weedily
growing along her path,
and then she is gone. The road
is empty of people. A stray
cat scurries across the path.
I hear goat bells in the distance
as though the past were living
in the silence of my trespassing.

 

A Look at Moving

At first, it is only a place to visit, far
wilder than the place you live—cliff, beach,
and secret coves teeming with fish and silver

octopi, roads high into the mountains,
where few expect to see you, except in passing,
but your heart has found a vessel for wandering,

a land with its hand out, its men roughed and sexy,
its women welcoming and warm, at first. Seems
even the shepherd can find a greeting for you,

even the priest, if you’re lucky. Who wouldn’t
want to live where the fishermen pull up to the dock
each morning with buckets of barboúnia,

where the reef holds silken waves of sea urchins;
and the groves, thousands of pungent olive trees?
Why would anyone not want to stay?

When winter curls up in a wave in September and
roars down the beach, you’re aware of what may be
coming. The dogs hurry in packs under the faint moon,

and the half-deserted taverna serves only to the men
in the village. The women in black move from window
to window, hall to hall, checking that the latch on the door

is up, that the supper left early on is waiting for someone
to come home hungry. Their own hunger is a secret gnaw
on the bone of night, with a hole in the sky, with a witness

to what goes on outside, before the unwelcome season
comes, before the last tourists leave, except for one—
and you are looking at moving again.

 

Donna J. Gelagotis Lee is the author of Intersection on Neptune (The Poetry Press of Press Americana, 2019), winner of Prize Americana, and On the Altar of Greece (Gival Press, 2006), winner of the Gival Press Poetry Award and recipient of a 2007 Eric Hoffer Book Award: Notable for Art Category. Her poetry has appeared in publications internationally, including The Bitter Oleander, Cimarron Review, Feminist Studies, and The Massachusetts Review. She lives in New Jersey.