MY FATHER'S PEOPLE

Faye George

Bazouki recordings blasting the air.
Handcrafts by the ladies of the Greek Church;
trays of dolmades, moussaka, sugar-dusted sweets.
Parking lot dust sweeps under the striped canopies

and settles in a fine mist. Every September they come
from both ends of Route 3, Greeks from all over
gathering at this sparse grove. (And the "barbarians"
with a taste for baklava, an ear for bazouki.)

These are my father's people, whose dance
I learned from a Jewish friend,
but I have no words for their songs.
Not family, it's the idea of family that brings me,

eavesdropping on soft consonant sounds,
stupidly pointing at foods whose honest names
I can't pronounce: keftethes, flaounes, . . .
moving among stalls of worry beads,

Parthenon T-shirts, knits and quilts
made by women serving spinach pie and shish kebab:
Thespinas, Sophias, Fotinis. . . . Names gather
on my tongue. The men pour Coca Cola,

Budweiser, resin-laced retsina,
that startles the stranger and puckers the friend.
I take some, settle myself on a stone in a thin shade,
a tatter of oak shared with toadstools, wild asters,

and Psyche, abandoned on a White Rock bottlecap.
From here I can watch the dancers circle and
  stumble,
the young in their bright colors and sweat-brilliant
then pour out the rest on the earth.
The veins of my hand trail toward the ground
in roots: Thalia, my haunted sister, a lifetime
  removed,
smoking and pacing in the cell of her hours;

Lambros, my father, old and alone in the city,
in the ruined temple of his pride.