David Weston
Bus into the mountains
Jolting up the pot-holed road to Apiranthos
Icons swung against the dusty windscreen,
Bazouki music soared, the driver sang
And gazing through the window you were filled
With joyful vertigo at every hairpin as
The slope just fell away in contoured terraces
Into a gulf of olives, and beyond that sheer
Upthrust of bleached bare limestone, towering cones,
A quarry's orange soar, crazed zig-zag tracks
To Godknows, chapels perched impossibly on peaks
And every time a car or lorry passed you held your breath
Imagining your wheels poised on the unfenced edge
Until an hour's laboured climbing brought you to
The island's backbone where the village clung
Like pale exotic mushrooms clustered on a ledge
And you could see both coasts at once
And white squat cylinders of windmills outlined on a ridge
Then, looming over all, the grey-green tilted slab
Of Mount Zeus, like some vast demented pyramid
Which seemed about to topple as you sipped
Greek coffee in a sunlit square of painted limes.
Page(s) 16
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