Demetra Demetriou holds a BA in Greek Philology from the University of Athens and both an MPhil (summa cum laude) and a PhD (summa cum laude) in Comparative Literature from Paris-Sorbonne University (Paris IV). She received scholarships for excellence by the Cyprus State Scholarship Foundation (IKY) and the A.G. Leventis Foundation and has been awarded grants by the University of Bristol and the Norman University Pole. She has taught for over ten years at the University of Cyprus, the Open University of Cyprus, and the University of Nicosia.
Demetra Demetriou is also a Senior Research Fellow at the Cyprus Centre of European and International Affairs (CCEIA). She is co-editor of the volumes Desire of Language: The Poetry of Kyriacos Charalambides (Athens: Herodotus, 2023) and Woman in the Text (Nicosia: Akti, 2019). Her recent essays, focusing on the work and politics of Yiannis Ritsos, George Seferis, Kyriacos Charalambides, contemporary women’s writing (1970- ), and feminist myth-making were widely published in peer-reviewed journals, edited volumes, conference proceedings, and other serial publications. She also writes poetry and prose. Her first poetry collection Agonies was published by Smili Publications, Athens, in 2023. Poems of this work have been put into music by composers such as Giorgos Kalogirou and Michalis Sakellis and were translated into English, Arabic, and Russian.
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Rho
Quelle Bellina is coming next to Digenis
You come from afar. Your hair rides on an unsuspected wind, thrashing the clouds, the thunders that come your way. Dolphins, touched gently, join you, slipping caresses below the surface of your own waters, in the Aegean of your own Sun, as you walk inwards at the speed of light, barefoot, a deep and complete fall of yours into the ocean, a bodywide immersion towards the upper ground, a solitary pilgrimage to the cape of your own solemnity, you pulsate impassive where your inner chest roars and its outer nipple petrifies,
Sea Lily.
You come from afar. Your face glows so much that it blinds us, we turn our face away again, bent down against the ground, as always. We don’t know your voice yet, we don’t know your sight, we don’t feel the warmth of your embrace, we don’t know your touch on our fingertips. We only turn our heads, as if awaken centuries after, towards the ages startled by your passing. Α rustle of leaves. Slow-moving reeds in the wind. Then nothing.
You are away from us like love.
Sister, you have taken over my day, my night, in your eyes the world is ascertained since before it’s born, your own distant sea, age-long source, mirrors across the mausoleum of my signals, and nobody arrived, nobody made it, nobody appeared naked on our coasts but the girl and its salt.
Salty shell. Water pitcher, and I drink.
Helen, you come from the great uprootings, running over the fossilized schemata with a force that cannot be reversed, unwithered twig, you escape bombings of lambs, leaving us hanging over a present that still urges, reinforced concrete ruins and love relics, History.
In your open arms the determinant and a new horizon, peering down into the brink of abyss, my kiss, without standards, without models, without a phallus, I stand fair and integral in the bosk of your frailty, of your own ever-living tenderness, unfortified city in the crossfire of their own vileness, on the edge of their own oblivion, torso wondrous of a perdurable and unavailing repetition on the sacred altar of the ages.
Mother, you have carried a country inside you, this is not a little; let them not see you, let them not see us, let them brag, stowed at half-mast, oversized men, women, especially the latter, with their well-ironed costumes, hydrocephalous and sorrowless upon our own blood.
P, to prey, Poet; this death.
Kore, like you, I come from the future, submerged in history I take part in your prehistory and move forth to the substance, in quest for the forgiving nucleus of our common humane origin.
By diving into your substance, I touch it. I mourn. I celebrate.
I now encompass your needs which encountered my own need, my own fears, time, which has always been my enemy. I tame it. My bodies are pigeon feathers, my trees grow roots, my petals blossom, my abdomen swells, a cuddle of stalk and feather for you.
I ask for forgiveness.
(A moon that sheds tears out into the open sea
silvering the waves that arrive spelled out
from me to you,
my shore)
Rose, star, stream· Rebelina.
Variants of your true name, Selana,
argent-coloured gift
you cried a sky on the earth, Love.
My rho and uncarved letter,
My Land.
I will be searching for you as much as you suffered and in your silences I shall exist, I will come every time you mourn and return holding lily, grain, grapes, fruit and nuts for you, an imperceptible transition on the side of holiness, I will carve the stone and on it your beauty, Eternity, I will march as much as they let me and when they stop me I will strike the light at their heart with the arrows of a rho, of a sound, Peace, I will be searching for you much as Ι was late and I will honor you with libations, offerings with milk from my source, Natura, I will love you as long as I speculate, I will wait, breathing studded from the pores on your skin, Blood-spattered, I am waiting for you as I quiver in the vast waters of your own womb, I sail, a shipwreck on your shores full of honey and myrrh in your depths, Homeland, I need you in exile and I will be searching for you through the world, Boldness, extant I die as I scatter my sails in the wind, altar of predators, perpetrators, and fondlers, Greece, as a distant promise of yours, my everlasting fire, I am searching for you as a vigorous imprint of yours, in the vertigo of every brave step, in the sense of reconquerance and as a weakened pulse from the bowels of the age of volcanoes, Pháos, I am waiting where you return relentlessly, in the generalizations of symbols and the vainness of infinity, my virginal vision. I am waiting for you at the edge of every life,
Revenant.
NOTES
This poem is written in honor of Elena Toumazi (alias Rebelina) (1947-2023), a pioneer of écriture féminine and feminist thinking in 1980s Paris, Athens, and Cyprus, who was largely discredited throughout her life. It is written after her own five variants of the letter “M,” from her groundbreaking Variants for the Earth (Παραλλαγές για τη Γη, 1981), which she dedicates to Hélène Cixous. A refugee from Ammochostos (Famagusta), the Eastern coastline of Cyprus, occupied by the Turkish army since the invasion of 1974, Rebelina opposes the feminine to abusive masculinity and phallic imposition. Rho (Greek: Ρω), in my short variant, stands for Eros… and many other things. The letter “P” in this translation replaces the Greek Theta (Θ), the subjective position of death: Thanatos.
Poetry in this post: © Demetra Demetriou
Published with the permission of Demetra Demetriou
