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Brian Johnstone: three Cretan poems

April 27, 2018 Jordan Ogg
Aliums.JPG

A History of Crete in Two Derivations
 

Candy

The Arabs named it for the ditch they breached
in capturing the town. But when they quit
they left the arts they’d honed: distilling scent

from blossoms and the waters of the springs,
to blend with honey, carob, mastic, spice: 
the pleasures that Al Kandak would export

to farther shores. The name, soon Latinised,
encompassed the whole island: Candia
that Venice claimed as hers. Still trade went on. 

The sweetmeats men would carry home as gifts,
would offer to their women, use to soothe
a tearful child, would assume the mantle

of the land. Thus candy was the treasure
that generations won, to spark delight
and appetite, draw sweetness to the tongue.

Carat

The Greeks defined it for its shape, the horn
the pod resembled. But its seeds, their mass
and regularity of form, those beans

that settled in the palm dependably
as they’d later settle in the cradle
of a balance, met Arab merchants’ need 

for uniformity of weight. Used thus
the word for carob rapidly transformed
to qyrat in their tongue. A base for sweets,

keration, now a benchmark of all wealth, 
became with time the carat, a unit
to rate diamonds, silver, gold; to mark out 

title, measure tenure; a gauge of lust
for all that glitters in the treasure house, 
the source of greed and bitterness to come. 
 

Kato Symi
 

It’s water that’s the measure of this place,
pacing out the lanes with its intent, advising
of itself. Water that is serious enough to have
its own routes, harboured by the roadside,

corralled through square and garden, alive
to the respect men hold it in, women show it
in the pitcher and the glass. Cup your hands
below the outfall at the fountain, drink your fill,

see streams that run between your fingers
pour on down this channel cut from rock
past oak and olive, chestnut, pine and plane,
the life-blood of the village numbering its veins.
 

Terraces
 

There isn’t much to choose between the flora of these slopes,
the terraces that climb this Cretan hill. Abandoned years ago, 

decades since any cultivation was in hand, they’re given over
now to scrub and thorn, wild herbs, a skim of stones, to sheep

that make their tracks between the rocks. But everywhere some
terrace walls still stand where excavators, forcing access routes,

have left them well alone. The labour of the making, each stone
heaped onto stone by hand a million times, ground levelled out

and packed down into shape for these so meagre plots, is more
than the imagination can take in. So little left. Some boundaries,

the flat steps of the fields that lined the hill and, looking down, 
the past still clearly printed in the soil: the last turned furrows

that a terrace must have borne; some hand, anonymous in time,
created, steered a plough and urged a mule to do its work. Sun

of half a century has set the earth in time, each rut a monument
to one man’s labour, one people’s hard-won bargain with its lot.


Brian Johnstone’s poetry has appeared throughout Scotland, elsewhere in the British Isles, in Europe, America and Australia. He has published six collections, most recently Dry Stone Work (Arc, 2014), and he is included on The Poetry Archive website. His memoir Double Exposure was published by Saraband in February 2017. His most recent pamphlet collection Juke Box Jeopardy was published in March 2018 by Red Squirrel Press. 

Photographs copyright of Brian Johnstone.

In Poetry Tags Crete
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