Comments & Greek artists, Greek painting: I listen, savouring the night stillness...

Poetry & modern Greek painters, Greek artists


Yannis Stavrou, Nocturnal, oil on canvas

abandoned sandstone that tells me to move on,
that here is nowhere, that I’m travelling...

Gregory O’Donoghue
Nocturne

Midnight. Only myself and a white-haired woman
have been set down at a dismantled rural station.
I watch her cross the tracks and fade
up a slope, vanish in a blur of conifers.

Lingering near the solitary building –
abandoned sandstone that tells me to move on,
that here is nowhere, that I’m travelling –
I listen, savouring the night stillness.

It is the aftertraces of flaring spirits
who’ve leapt after diminishing carriages,
it must be these making the quietness quicken.

And I’m numbed a moment at seeming to see
the snow-haired woman returning; it’s only
a chalky cat stealing in a crouch across
the moonlight, unless I am doubly mistaken.