valentine's day poem for my wife

laughter -- that's the sound
i've missed. how your voice bounces &
swoops down stairs &
around corners, through walls.

visit me there; here,
again -- help me find
new ways of exploring joy,

voicing it though singing, making
love, answering again this dance
in & out of time, wearing
eternity like a promise,
this full-throated exultation.

a christmas poem for my wife

let me say it again - this promise. this confession:
i love you.
seasons pass, we struggle and fight, we gain a few pounds
and still, here we are, together

valiant, unshaken, faces set like flint
against arrayed and clamourous foes - knowing we must
never stop walking forward; together.

vital tasks must be determined,
lavishly executed, exhaustively pursued.
i have sometimes failed you in protecting these
essentials, yet still you gift me with
together and together and together.

merry christmas.

in the midst of these often-too-busy season, may you find the sweet spot of rest. 

may 2011 pale in comparison to the joy you experience in 2012.

nicholas samaras: rebetiko psalm

Then, sing a psalm of the outsider race –
an entire nation of us without borders,
a conglomerate tribe of exiles recognisable

by the same light in our same eyes.
We were Anatolian and Greek under the Ottoman boot.
We were African and immigrant processed

over the waves of the flat, grey Atlantic.
We came from mainlands possessed by others.
Once native, we were suddenly ethnic.

We came from Alatsata, thrown out of our homes
and our country. Everyone was the Lord’s people –
but we were still cast off from even our Holy Altars, thrown

into the dust of the roads leading
out of every town, disinterred from even
the cemeteries of our ancestors –

evicted from the dust of the world
and plunged into the coldest harbours across the seas –
not even our own abroad wanting us – but repelling

us on from the pocked ports of Bodrum, Piraeus,
Liverpool, and Ellis Island, funneling to the factories of Woburn.
And in exile, what did we ever find but ourselves,

a stark room to decorate – the wind
chugging into our scarves, our rolled-up coats for pillows,
the damp wool souring our breath?

We became alienation and exile from everything we’d known.
We left behind the bones of our ancestors in graves
only the wind would comb.

We were emptied eyes and haunted souls
who established shanty towns outside of Athens, who sifted
into new ghettos of the Mani. What could we do

but become the other of ourselves, until we were irreducible?
What could we do but sing into the wind and darkness,
to cup the breeze of our leaving?

We were blues before blues. We were exile and alienation
until the blues were always with us, until
we couldn’t remember a generation or place or time

without blues. We became Rebetes who sang and played
for all the suffering and lost, played for survival and all
the rag-alley years of missing homes and homeland.

In this way, we lived through transit, subsisted through
the squabbled and claimed neighbourhoods of the world.
We lived through countries. We existed through dictatorships.

We endured through emigration and deportation.
The word was refugee, with no countries wanting us.
Our resting was brief – our homes became transit until

we were citizens of transience. Even the wind, empty of us.
So, we filled our emptiness. We were simple and ordinary souls,
some turning to the narcotic of sorrow for loss and misfortune,

some turning to the melodies of the melancholic and crooning –
a spliff of amnesia and a dancing for sorrow.
We tied up with the baglama. Our daily living became the minor

chords of the gittith. Rootless, we became a roots music,
full of grief and passion, romance and bitterness.
When our lives became a haze of coastal cities and alleys,

the cradles of the tavern and the den became our hearth.
The prison and the boarding house became our nests.
When all we could hold was our breaths –

we breathed Alatsata. We breathed ancestors.
Our breathing accompanied castanets and clattering glass,
the droning of worry beads tapped against a sweating drink.

We sang of Smyrna and Pontos. We sang and the songs
possessed us, so we could possess something –
a life, an identity held in our breaths, individuals held together.

We sang for generations, citizens in nameless countries until
we became our own country of song. Singing our breaths, we moved
into ourselves – singing our breaths to make sure we’re alive,

we were a universal tribe cast into the universe, singing to be still, 
a soulful psalm of an outsider

nation singing to belong, to be home.

__________________________________

(an audio file of mr. samaras reading the poem can be found here - scroll down)

nicholas samaras: psalm of waking

Good morning to the birds of heaven.

Good morning to the sun after the insomniac hours.

Good morning to the chenille blanket that held me cozy.

Good morning to the family pictures on the wall, reclaiming their faces.

Good morning to the bedstead of my father and his father before him.

Good morning to my children who, with their stuffed animals,

climb in to cuddle and hold me for more minutes of sleeping.

Good morning to the luxurious stretching of my arms,

legs, and waist—as they reclaim the shape of my body.

A very good morning to the hazy, impressionist trees in early fog

as they rustle the blue sky into solid colour.

Good morning to the free gift that lets me choose a better choice.

Good morning to the birds of heaven as I want to sing

back to them, to give them the company they bless me with.

Good morning to crumbs that feed even the earth.

Good morning to my Lord whom I wish to breathe into my being.

Good morning to my heart that lifts to the birds of heaven

and my fresh chance to again make this one day right,

this one day I hope to appreciate and earn

as I step onto the green and dewy world’s mantled body

and the morning lies before me.