Vasilios Theodorakis – An Online Author

As the year comes to a close, I’ve managed to pencil a few new poems during the month of December. The first to appear online is Shadow Takes Reality. The other new poems (written during this short but prolific spurt) will also appear on the blog before I resume editing older material.

Though cutting it a bit fine, I should be finishing the year by uploading a single poem per week (as I had hoped). All things going well, I should also be able to stick to this minimum posting in 2009. Again a big thank you to all this blog’s readers who’ve hung around during an excruciating slow 2008.

In addition to Shadow Takes Reality I’ve also added some links to other authors, whose work I’ve read over the years. These include: John Chryssavgis, C.S. Lewis, Frank J. Tipler, Saint Andrew Of Bethsaida and Saint Nicholas Of Myra.

Cheers – Vasilios Theodorakis – December 2008

In a time of upheaval,
Nothing can be saved.
My kind left behind the plates where they lay,
Took only one piece of cutlery – just a knife,
And abandoned their linen
To the moths next door.
They locked down the doors,
Boarded up the panes,
Dropped jewelery into wells
And fled into the night.
They stayed off the roads
Made for the salt spray.
And spoke the Young Turks talk,
In order to blend in with the crowds –
Crowds who had come down to see
How red the earth’s tears had turned.
Death then took them all the way
To the promised land
Where the other’s plates were now their’s to claim.
But nothing felt right.
After 86 years
Of living with a pricked conscience – hidden beneath eucalyptus,
This generational itch was resolved.
By chance,
A trip back from the other side
Found the board
Where it was placed
And the plates
Where they were laid.

When queried about this,
The Gorukle replied –
We thought you’d return.
We left everything as it was,
For you were our friends, our brothers, our sisters,
And these things were not ours to take.
It never dawned on the Christians
Who reached the promised land
To extend such a courtesy.
The Christians deserved all that was abandoned
And left nothing for the Moslems to return to –
Moving into their homes almost immediately.
And yet, to this day
My kind
Claim to be the better human beings.
Now why is that again?

Audio Version (To Be Added)
Copyright © Vasilios Theodorakis 2008

Not a word, not a whisper,
Not a finger lifted
To query my angst.
Empathy ounced
In minuscule bags,
Is dangled briefly before vestibular eyes
Then shoved
Into bottomless pockets
That shock infect one’s own expression.
The benefit of the doubt
As always – my call,
Led to the dysfunctional response.
Maybe my witness was tainted,
Maybe illness fogged up
These lensed off events,
For I continued to pour
Years of investment
Into one way streets –
Unusual for Melbournian roads.
And this fact,
Should have been my warning heeded.
Yet, I put aside my own rules
And ricocheted forward – until now
Where their personal inconvenience
Body slammed me into the pavement.

These people
Were never family!
Thank goodness
For the Grant-ed role model,
Which now fills the void
The emotional chasm left behind
By those who tainted the sacred.

Audio Version (To Be Added)
Copyright © Vasilios Theodorakis 2008

Us
The lone dogs of war
Feel safe –
Only when “C” follows “B” and “B” follows “A”.
Our need for things to stay the same,
To have beginnings, middles and ends – is non-negotiable.
For those civilians
Looking through our blasted front doors,
These regimented lives – these routines,
Look restricted at best.
How impossible it is
To explain that this approach
Makes us feel good,
Keeps us sane
And able to face another day.
Soldier, Stray or Survivor,
Our physical form, our truthful tales
Are always irrelevant.
All that matters is the outcome.
Trauma, to the point
Of life ending now,
Lands us in the same trench
Clenching, ground down teeth,
And stabbing true,
At any
Who attempt to drag us from our fox holes.
No ones fault – in the end,
Just life gone wrong
And we cope through continued containment,
Whether at the gym,
In the garden,
Or – alone.

“Traumateous Polemous” (translation – injuries of war)
Was my grandfather’s term.
I sometimes wonder
If he imagined
Such things could occur
Within the sterile walls
Of Suburbia.

Audio Version (To Be Added)
Copyright © Vasilios Theodorakis 2008