One Night in Cyprus

This is a story I have waited decades to tell. One night in 1974 I had an intense dream, in which I was inside another person's mind and body. I was on the island of Cyprus, escaping by night from an unspecified peril. This poem relates the dream, exactly as it occurred. By the end of the next day, the world knew that a Greek junta-led coup had taken over Cyprus, and its Greek leader, Archbishop Makarios, had fled. These events led to a Turkish invasion and the permanent partition of Cyprus.

On the back of a truck
hurtling without headlamps
on a moonlit night on Cyprus,
the archbishop sat, cross-legged.

He saw great silhouettes of cedar trees
and overhanging crags black-edged,
an open sky of fierce and unnamed stars —

stars whose names he’d never learned,
though Greek and Arab astronomers
had classed and ordered them,
hard-tracing beasts and maidens,
hunters and bears, cup-bearers loyal
to the rampant, seducing cosmos,

now a mere tapestry for Christ’s passing.
Now he, a mariner without sail or star
had put his trust in strangers (strangers
who came from god and might be god),
hidden like thief beneath a flapping tarp,
a lump among fogs and onions
inhaling the incense of root earth.

The driver stopped, the men
invisible to him in the truck cab

came ’round to lift the tarp. He winced.
You may stretch your legs, Father.
We have reached the peak —
So far no sign of any soldiers.
We’ll send a scout ahead on foot,
the crossroads below a last point
of danger we’ll be stopped and captured.

He nodded, thanked and blessed them,
his hand making the crossroads sign
as he thought of the feared places
where Hecate was summoned and fetuses
buried. Thus one always shuddered at crossroads.

He walked to road-edge. If ever a prayer
was called for, it was now. No altar, no walls.

The arched cedar tree cupped praying hands,
the slope was dotted with flowers —
what color, the asphodel at midnight?

He said some words, not for himself at first,
then for himself, for so much depended
on his getting out and away, to save the country.
But where, in dark night, did prayers go?

* * *

I never knew you. I never heard of you.

I have never seen Cyprus, and yet the dream
that seized me was realer than real.
I felt the pain of your bones, I sighed your sigh
as you knelt and prayed. I did not grasp the words
or the language in which they were uttered.
Yet my self watching myself dreaming told me:

this is Cyprus, and this is happening.
Your prayer, for whatever cause, rose not to heaven:

it came to me, an atheist, and half a world away.

You fled the Greek-led coup on Cyprus, a hunted man,
and you escaped that night; you flew to London.
You returned to endure a Turkish invasion.
Your statue stands in Nicosia.
Why you, why me, Archbishop Makarios?