JUNE 2004
It was on a burnt-up piece of ground which denied everything green
...they were burning black-lettered pages and papers,
Which rose out of the smoke like bodies with hands and faces,
And like spirits ascending into the heights
Took wing with the morning skylarks.
Then in the
sweet, rose-embroidered dawn, just before the sun had
risen
There fell upon the morning air three psalms -
3. The
Gipsy Psalm
Anti-Christians, Hellenes and polytheists,
Select, harmonious remnants of past history.
And you too, followers of the Nazarene flocking after the
friars,
You may cry and burn and ban - you are all alike
idolaters!
There is not one of you, even though he may be a miracle
of wisdom and honour,
Who receives from the sun of life the beam that bestows
light.
In the
depths of the ocean, where light does not penetrate,
there live whales,
Which see, though the sun does not shine upon them. Their
sun
Is in their own bodies, phosphoresence, which imparts to
them
The dim vison of an underwater dream.
You resemble those whales. All that is yours -
Spiritual revelry of Olympus, immemorial names of
beautiful divinities,
The crosses of Golgotha, the Virgin Athena, the Blessed
Virgin,
The icons before which you bow in expectation of
miracles,
And the exquisitely sculptured bodies of gods and heroes
-
All are nothing, both these and those, all useless.
None of you commands perfect Justice or complete Virtue;
For anger and hatred drive you to the right and you to
the left.
There is no room for both of you on the earth,
And if you had the whole of space you would quarrel over
it.
Foolish friar, stoke your fire, burn and burn, all in
vain!
Out of these ashes the golden eagle of the Idea
Shall spread wings broader than ever towards the sun.
You too, philosopher, you may refurbish your polytheistic
doctrines,
Borrowing names from the ancients and mystical cults from
the Chaldeans,
Yet they are all fictions, all futile.
Your magnificent edifice is a mausoleum,
And that which sways above it, as though alive
Is only the shadow of an overhanging tree.
No Sparta, no Athens, no Constantinople!
Yet
from all those deaths, from all those servitudes
Slowly softly new lives, new liberations
Are sowing, growing, spreading
From the mountain-tops to the sea-shores.
.......Everything
that you ban and banish is caught up
By gusts of wind, flights of birds and butterflies,
Which fold them gently in their wings
And carry them to distant countries where they become
once more
Seeds and buds and nests.
A light from the East has pierced the mist of the West
Everywhere flesh, everywhere mad delight!
....Pagans
and Gallileans, one day you shall clasp hands.
Clear sighted and refreshed from the magic herb of life.
Then you will see phantoms for what they really are
And stretch your hands to grasp your share of all that
lives
...for there in the mountains of Thrace, on the heights
of Ipiros
As I nursed my ravenous hunger
I encountered a people, new scholars of history,
Descending from the cliffs and precipices along with the
tumbling streams,
A people that has no books, no pagan deities, whose
schools are in experience.
An independent people with a mind and strength of its own
...they strike panic into the poltroons of the lowlands
Who give them bad names, terrorists, bandits, klephts.
They arouse hatred in all monarchs and tyrants,
Among bowed heads they walk upright, among the craven
they are soldiers.
With their heads in black bandannas, you might call them
monks;
With their shoulder-capes, you might call them
philosophers.
Call them Christians for they worship Christ,
And their Christ is full of youth;
What you lay seige to with empty words, they assault with
life.
They do not stoop to raise fallen alters from the ground.
They are like fathers of children who will create regions
shining like the sun.
In them the milk of health is mingled with the knowledge
of sacrifice.
.... in them a great heart thunders life and truth.
Kostis
Palamas, The 12 Lays of the Gypsy
ENDNOTE : I want to thank all my contributors who
will be dismayed by the absence of their pages
this month. However, these present circumstances ; a
rising crescendo of War Crimes in the Middle East,
created by this trio, the undisciplined
"armies" of contractors and State Military
Forces of the UK, the USA and the Zionists of Israel ;
have created my utter mental exhaustion combined with a
rage I can't assuage with rest or reading, and
necessitated a radical change - an issue 
that is an ACCUSATION, and with which I weep for
the wounded, the dying, the prisoners and the children. I
too, with love and pain, my beloved, give this ACCUSATION
to all my friends and readers
Jocelyn Braddell, Editor.
