Whatever I loved vanished with the houses
that were new last summer
and crumbled in the winds of autumn.
(George Seferis, Mythistorema)
Poor George, with his
You wouldn’t happen to have seen
My childhood home,
With his I’m sure I had it somewhere round here,
Running his hands under the hot tap
Till he feels something -
A most unhappy Ambassador!
In Athens, Cairo and Johannesburg
A most gloomy presence:
Amongst the twinkling of eyes,
The tinkling of silver,
The inkling that
That which is
Is that which is not.
Poor George,
With his carelessness around real estate:
mortgage providers beware!
The vetting officers raised their eyebrows
And reached for a new pad of paper.
Autumn came,
And the usual happened.
George, someone told me
You’ve been hearing strange things through the radio.
Is there something we need to talk about?
Nothing which isn’t there
In the repeated landscape
As far as the eye can see;
In the morose sea-salt.
29 October 2022
About this poem
This poem was partly inspired by Oliver Gosling’s painting ‘Stand’ (see image below). The painting was displayed along with the poem at the Fitzrovia Gallery, London in December 2022, as part of Gosling’s solo exhibition. Below is the painting and the text which accompanied the poem at the exhibition.
“I have long admired the originality and arresting beauty of Oliver’s work. I asked to see a list of which paintings would feature in the show, in the hope that it would inspire some of my own writing, as it had done before.
When I saw the disappearing house shown in ‘Stand’, it immediately brought to mind certain images of the Greek poet George Seferis. Houses in Seferis’ work often come to a tragic end of some kind – they collapse, they are taken away, etc. Many regard this as related to the destruction of Seferis’ hometown, Smyrna (Izmir), in 1922.
More broadly, I see the primary theme of the poem as a reflection, perhaps mischievous, on Seferis’ twin roles as senior Greek diplomat and poet. As a former Ambassador to London and member of the Greek government in exile in World War Two, he had a major public role. However, the introspective lyricism of his poetry seems to come from a different universe from that of the high-profile public official, which I find fascinating.
A number of the images in the poem are drawn from Seferis’ poetry.”
Random Descent 