Poetry
Root, William Pitt
William Pitt Root With No Other Witness for Yannis Ritsos "before any charge of atrocity will warrant investigation, there must be a second witness." Amnesty International In Greece I met a...
...A decade later, free, still within earshot of the faithful ocean, he gestures to his study shelves, pointing with a cigarette "On stones I found stone faces...
...stones return their gaze...
...Amnesty International In Greece I met a man who wrote for years in exile on an island, wrote with no other witness than sea-wind and the ranked blue waves, -hiding the rolled up poems in his trouser cuffs, permitting guards to believe his pen was for finding faces in the stones and drawing them out, feature by feature, as gifts for the villagers, for guards to give to their local sweethearts...
...William Pitt Root With No Other Witness for Yannis Ritsos "before any charge of atrocity will warrant investigation, there must be a second witness...
...72, have the sweethearts in the villages forgotten him...
...eyes still shining...
...storms out of nowhere, dolphins that sing...
...Guards, beware of gentlemen when stones return their gaze...
...Harmless enough, they must have supposed...
...Handing out watching him sit all those years among stones the generous sea would present to him...
...read in forty-seven tongues " Nor, he adds, smiling...
...with all the Aegean for his audience' For his tutor, is more like it...
...For the sea is full of surprises-deaf shells charged with endless whispering...
...while he labored tirelessly with his gifts...
...but my passions were unmasked in poems now...
Vol. 116 • January 1989 • No. 1
