Poetry | George Kalamaras

—based on Aglaia Papa’s painting Cyprus Mothers

 

How many faces of death are there? Winter? Spring? Summer?

 

A crow flies into your belly one autumn afternoon.

 

Eight hours later you dream of your dead mother

 

buying you a leather hat. You can never have

 

too much protection, she says, handing the clerk several stiff bills.

 

These Cyprus Mothers cry out for the dead

 

mirrors they can no longer hang or look into. No longer

 

face their own faces, for inside them are the daughters

 

and sons they have lost. Embedded there like dust or light

 

morning sleep when they approach the engulfing edge

 

of knowing too much. Only a protest, they say. Only signs our poor

 

children held up in the streets. Even the donkeys of these

 

mothers cry out with terrifying animal sounds that seem to

 

arise from the depth of dry wells. A dry well is what is

 

in the heart, now, of these mothers. They have wept so long

 

even the weeping hurts. These five faces Aglaia Papa

 

has painted somehow become one. One large face

 

of communal doom. How could she have known

 

this depth of maternal sorrow? How many rats had crawled

 

into the hay loft of her art studio to instruct her

 

on the multiple ways of biting and eating, the multiple ways

 

of defecating death? A tobacco strike could never be

 

enough to send the living mothers into a burn of hurt

 

from which they could never emerge. Papa somehow

 

captures the dread of knowing our own faces can suddenly

 

change from joy to anguish. We dream a mother

 

coming to us one night as a crow. And the next morning

 

we find a dead sparrow on the patio chair. There are

 

ways of knowing only the dead know. Five ways they keep

 

            trying to tell. Five ways of weeping as we bring our-

 

selves into a mirror each morning hoping to see into and

 

through the other side of an internal cry we tell no one.