They Shoot Horses, Don’t They?
VazamBam
by Vassilis Zambaras
“Zanna, Hello and Goodbye, 6:30 a.m.”
My friend,
The young Kurd who works
A daily twelve-hour shift
At the local service station,
Has been on duty long before daybreak,
But as my bicycle is not
An automobile
And thus needs nothing
But air, he remains
In his cubicle and continues
Listening to songs
Of the motherland. Still, I know
He keeps an eye out for me
For when I leave,
I see an upright hand
Waving in the air.
“Old Woman Bearing Flowers”
Black-clad
White-haired octogenarian
Has just picked some
Purple lilac
And one red
Rose from the road-
Side a goodly way
Distant and is now
Bringing them back
Home to where
Who knows what
Memories await her.
MELIGALAS, Greece—(Weekly Hubris)—12/20/10—Two vignettes of two people of vastly different ages and backgrounds brought to you courtesy of my steed’s frequent forays through the countryside and villages of Upper Messenias.
Had I written a poem for every 10 kilometers cycled, I’d now have a magnum opus of 750 poems, and could keep this Weekly Hubris column well-lubricated with biking poems and running at a breakneck pace for at least 28 more years. Not long enough? Do not despair, O stablemen/women of that pesky albeit inspiring nag called Pegasus—judging from the paltry number of “hits” this column has received since its inception, I think it’s fair to say it will hoof it to the glue factory, oblivious and with nary an injury, to its dying day.
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