One Way to Say Goodbye
One Way to Say Goodbye
He passes away while democracy falters
on its way to the USA, just before the holiday
for Hydra’s patron saint. The same
bells ring, the same processions are made,
the same these priests have been making for centuries.
The poets and writers and drifters of the sixties
are gone. No one plays a guitar under the pine tree
at Dousko’s now that the tourists, too, are gone for the winter.
The electricity he lamented and running water
have stayed so the few restaurants play
recordings of Bird on a Wire and Hey, That’s No Way
for me and the priests. Tea and oranges, flowers
and pomegranates multiply at his door. Who am I here,
a poet after the poets and writers and drifters
have disappeared? This is the way
I have always listened to Leonard Cohen anyway,
on my own processions through streets,
sitting in doorways under the moon,
alone in a room. Here are the rooms
where he wrote songs I traveled through
when I was sick for a decade, over the wall
is the terrace from the photograph I studied:
Leonard Cohen playing guitar in the eighties
after the other poets and writers, the drifters were gone,
Leonard Cohen singing to the rooftops, to the mountain.
© Maia Evrona 2021
I am currently back in the United States after nine months in Spain and Greece, and am awaiting a new visa. In the meantime, in these months between the anniversary of his birth and the anniversary of his death, and during the Days of Awe of course, I have been thinking of this poem I wrote last year about being in Hydra the week Leonard Cohen passed away in 2016.