A Partial History
VazamBam
by Vassilis Zambaras
“A Partial History”
Light. The hard dirt floor
my mother waits on
the midwife knows her
time has come, this time
there is no other
time.
*
Moving, I perceive all things
To be moving.
*
Away from me.
*
Still
“Adolescent”
easily
taking a-
part
the resilient
soft
red
rubber
ball
to where
he finds
its hard
perplexing
core.
MELIGALAS, Greece—(Weekly Hubris)—10/25/10—I was born on a hard-packed dirt floor—the same floor that some years before had been the scene of a murder committed in front of my mother by my father’s cousin who had slit the throat of his sister because he thought—mistakenly—she had been having an affair with his best friend. A simple earthen floor packed with so many complex and bewildering memories.
The image of me meticulously taking apart a soft, red rubber ball with my fingernails is the earliest memory I have of my childhood and I always thought it was a memory of Raymond back in the late 40’s. Several years ago, however, I was in my home village of Revmatia talking with a friend whom I hadn’t seen for many years. During the course of our conversation, he happened to mention that ball. I couldn’t believe what I was hearing—the ball had been sent to me from the US by my father in 1948. It had made an indelible impression on all the village urchins, as they had never ever seen such a wonderful bouncing ball before and here before their bewildered eyes was one from a faraway place called America!
Just like my mother some years before, we couldn’t believe what we were seeing.
Vassilis Zambaras
Vassilis Zambaras According to such reliable inside sources as The Weekly Hubris’s Publishing-Editor, VazamBam aka Vassilis Zambaras is all of the following, and more, in an order no one can vouchsafe as definitive: a publishing poet who writes every day of his life; a hugely successful father (and a not-so-very-successful local political candidate); a professor of English as a Foreign Language, with portfolio; a Renaissance Man of many skills, useful and not-so; a fount of information about his particular corner of his birth country; an unstable and utterly unique mix of Greek and American, American and Greek; and the man fortunate and wily enough to have made off with Messenia’s loveliest and most talented local daughter as his child bride. Besides being all the aforementioned, other more dubious sources have also reported seeing him hanging out at the corner of vazambam.blogspot.com—in the guise of a “new old kid on the blog, with an occasional old or new poem written off the old writer’s block.” Author Photo: Pericles Boutos