Mala 50 / He broke his sling that killed birds

^{for Yannis Ritsos}

On Makronissos did he dream of guitars
& the birds that fell asleep in his pockets
at home who became insomniacs
on the prison island the Americans invented

Makronissos / designed to extirpate
his communist cyclamen & his communist love
for the teenagers shot from the roof of the parliament
when the British switched sides & trained the police
who’d killed for the Germans the day before

love for the farmers who laughed
at Churchill’s idea of a king

love for the village network of whispers
for how villagers treated all manner of conquerors
for the light & the waves he knew from his first day
chewing the chains postwar empire was reforming

If you keep resisting demokratia
said the Americans
We can make it so island for you

I’ve dislocated my soul, could you pop it back in
It hurts so much I can’t help but sing
Is that what he said to the 11,999
Greeks he was islanded with
& to the cyclamen & the light & the waves
the stones he had to carry & break
the brambles & the sand

the moon that never changed allegiances
or signed a declaration of repentance

& did he say that to poetry

Makronissos / The island to manufacture silence
Makronisiotika / The poems he made there

Maybe you’ve seen other versions of this
the Battalionists vs. the communists
among them the poets
who could be found

tipping their heads back to see the gulls
drinking their voices as if it were language

putting banned words in bottles to bury
& remembering where
for the days someone might listen again

Copyright © 2024 by Suzanne Gardinier. Originally published in Poem-a-Day on April 10, 2024, by the Academy of American Poets. 

Subscribe to the Poem-a-Day Podcast 

  

“This is Section 50 of a long poem called ‘The🀰malas: Plan B(e).’ It’s grown from research on U.S. intelligence projects aimed at culture. This is from a section called ‘The Birdland Malas,’ focused both on intelligence projects named after birds—Phoenix, Black Eagle, Mockingbird—and on poets, whose voices have resisted imperial projects like these for as long as they’ve existed. One hero of this kind of resistance was and is Greek poet Yannis Ritsos, who was repeatedly imprisoned and tortured by Greek governments backed by the United States. All the grace in the poem is his.”
—Suzanne Gardinier