Published in Issue 62.3: Summer 2023
heu! misero coniunx fatone erepta Creusa substitit?. . .
—Aeneid, II
Even in the Underworld, you didn’t
Look for me. When bombs fell, and the walls
Rubbled, and we ran through black streets, holding
The hands of our small son, and you shouldered your father—
Out of his wheelchair he weighed less than our backpacks
Stuffed with phones and phone chargers, the passports,
Our marriage certificate, some warm clean socks
And candied dates for the road and a roll of money
For the smugglers—I tripped, I stopped. I fell
Behind. I thought I’d meet you in the forest
Where groups gathered to wait their turn for crossing,
Men and women, teenagers, toddlers, infants.
In vessels overloaded, on dark currents,
It turns out any ferryman can be
Charon in disguise. You wouldn’t see me
Even if you had looked. I didn’t make it.
Because you aren’t allowed to carry much
You wear three layers of clothes that drag you down
When the dinghy starts to keel and tilt the horizon.
I still wait on the wrong side of the water
Where the unburied are, my voice filled
With something brackish, like sobs. I too would sing
“Remember me, remember me, but ah!” —
O you who planted Europe and her walls.
A. E. Stallings is a US-born poet and translator who lives in Greece. She has published four collections of poetry, most recently Like (a finalist for the Pulitzer Prize). A collection of selected poems, This Afterlife, is just out with Farrar, Straus and Giroux. She has received fellowships from the Guggenheim and MacArthur Foundations. She has been teaching a workshop with refugee and migrant women in Athens at the Melissa Network since 2015.
