kos


we wake to the big bed
in the small room
at the end of
the dark corridors

we wake to sunlight
songs of children shouts of soldiers

we wake in a venetian bed
inlaid with painted saints
wood as wide and knobbly
as the mattress

wake to children playing
in overgrown rubble
that could be thirty or
three thousand years old

to the drum of army lorries
taut rattle of metal
meaningless curse of orders

we wake in the small room, its door
a false exit from the gloomy
decaying maze of the old hotel,

to find a small owl
perched on the balcony
next to our towel

so self-contained, so seeming
watchful in sleep, awake in dreams,
that generations of lovers
of soldiers and children,
of sunlight on carved rubble,

went and came, came and went,
as we lay on the big bed
beneath the round eyes of the saints