Fool
The sea kissed you and sent you to me
To take you back to the smiles of my childhood
I had nothing else to offer you
I chased butterflies in the summertime
And wrote stories for you
Where did you and those colorful suitors go
When I was moaning and getting muddy
Fighting Circe’s pigs,
Fool,
The war cry was for all of us
You hung it in the closet
And fell asleep carefree
Where did you go with the dreams I gave you
The pebbles, the butterflies, and the stars of my childhood
What did you do with my heart,
Fool,
What did you do
The night they said there’d be a storm
And we filled our oil lamps quietly?
I waited for you
In the bare land with the festive thymes
The gods who play and the alive people
So where did you go
And you burned down the Doric temples
And the almond tree that once bloomed in your eyes
Where
With my love hanging loose in the wind
And my thoughts caught up in your hair,
Fool,
I set sail to bring you back our blue sea
And found you bare and different
Counting your chained feelings
I put my heart on again
But it didn’t fit.
Maria Karametou was born in Athens, Greece. She is a mixed media artist, writer, and professor with an international exhibition record that includes museum and gallery shows in Germany, Greece, Russia, the USA, Bulgaria, Turkey, China, and Korea, among many others. Her most recent solo exhibition was at the Katzen Museum, AU, Washington, D.C. She is the recipient of several awards, such as a Fulbright Senior Research Scholar, the First Prize in the Maryland Biennial, and her work is a many public and museum collections. As a writer, Karametou received the Second Prize in the Washington Metropolitan Area Short Story Competition, and her story was published in the Bethesda Magazine. Other publications involve inclusion in a poetry anthology, numerous artist statements, artist books, and essays. Most recently, she was invited to present her poems at the D.C. Embassy of Greece. Her website is mariakarametou.com
