Despina's Rug

by Dean Kostos

1) What did I know?
Every snowy day, I wiped my stocking feet on the prayer rug,
not knowing what it was, where it came from.  Its crimson
patterns bled a blurred unknowing.  Winters melted.
Mom and Dad divorced.  He rolled up the rug, moving it

to his new apartment.  The rug's arrow, meant to point to Mecca, 
was a lost compass, not knowing what Mecca was.
Dad hung the rug like a map on his wall.  After all, 
it was a piece of his past, his parents:  Greeks 

from Smyrna.  "They had to leave with what they could carry,"
he'd tell us in a rare indulgence of memory.  Or simply:
"That was the past."  But Smyrna's patterns wove
and wove into my thoughts.  I needed to understand 

the lands carved by victors into divisions of beef:
shank, loin, flank, round.  But this was Homer's home,
my grandparents' home, rising on Ionic shafts:  Ephesos,
Halicarnassos, Aphrodisias, Pergamon . . . Smyrna.

2) What did they know?
"Not us!"  As Allies anchored near the bay, 
Ottoman bombs burst craters through schools,
churches, skulls.  Soldiers gasolined fires and fires, 
windows belched fountains of flame.

"Not us!"  Mobs chopped off right hands that signed
the cross.  Children were skewered with bayonets.
Mobs pulled priests onto streets, gouged out
their eyes, sliced off their penises,

fed them to dogs.  Nightfall.  A flame-wall razed 
only the Armenian, the Greek, the Frankish quarters.
Soldiers raped, then knifed women, heaving
their corpses into the inferno.  A black snow 

of flesh blotted the sky, searchlights
cleaving the ash like scimitars.  Greeks leaped
into stygian waters, swarming toward refuge.
When they reached the ships, the Allies hacked off

their arms.  Their torsos torqued in agony
sinking into oblivion.  Inside the ships:
waiters carried trays to tables.
Women in velvet gowns, businessmen in tuxedos 

sipped champagne and ate flambees by curtained windows.
At one party,  lieutenant apologized, "Forgive
my coming late.  A refugee's corpse jammed
our rudder; it took so long to cut her loose."

Voices wailed along the quay like wind through charred
branches:  "Ta plia!  Ta plia!  Voeethia! . . ." 
A ragged two-mile line of refugees, swayed back
and forth, praying for someone to save them.  To drown 

out their voices, lieutenants turned up phonographs
(strains of Humoresque, arias from Pagliacci);
navy bands played concerts till down,
But nothing could dispel the stench 

of burnt flesh and gasoline.  Engulfed by smoke
mountains, Smyrna crumbled like a cremated 
skeleton into a history neither History 
nor my father would speak.  I need 

to understand:  into the desert, men, women, children
marched with shackled wrists.  Lips blistered
like ocean beds when the memory of water eluded
memory.  Hunger gnawed the captives until they 

vanished into a mirage.  I need to understand
how some got away, thanks to Allies who disobeyed
orders.  My grandparents—Despina and Mayos—
clutching their finest icon, fled.  Caped in blankets 

and rugs, they trudged away their soles,
continued barefoot to Thrace, then to Kavala, 
arced like a sickle around the sea.  To shelter
his wife from pelting rain, Mayos

curved a Turkish prayer rug around her shoulders, 
If only it could have flown!  They rolled
the rug up, slept on it like a pillow, 
carried it by day, led by its arrow.  Greece teemed

with refugees, living in shacks, stinking
of shit, sweat, hashish.  Burning with disease, 
refugees slept in streets, in theaters,
on the cool of marble ruins.  Families crowded

velvet-lined opera boxes.  Camps dotted miles
of beach.  Hordes guzzled cheap wine, 
their wails twisting into song, Mayos,
who spoke five languages, won passage to New York. 

Despina waited like Penelope—not weaving a tapestry
in a citadel—but sewing rugs together in a shack,
boiling moss-soup from stones, nursing other women's
newborns.  Some women sold their sex.  Did she?

3) What did she know?
Four years later, the envelope.  She ripped it open,
gripping the ticket to America.  As she lay sleepless
aboard the steamer, her mind must have swarmed
with imagined images of her recreated life.  

In a Harlem tenement of two little rooms, 
she and Mayos raised four children.  The name
"Despina" carried her burden, meaning:  lady, 
sovereign, keeper of the home.  But her home 

was extinct.  She called the new one "exile."
When my father was fifteen, he found her dead body,
collapsed like a pile of laundry.  Doctors never knew
why.  I need to understand:  Did she collapse under the weight 

of a mourning that couldn't be lifted?  Did rage char
a hole through her, like a Smyrna carried in her chest?  
Or, was she so tired she just gave up?  Dad's memory
of her—handed down to me like a cameo—becomes my own: 

I see him as a boy, spying Despina 
through her cracked-open bedroom door:  she shakes loose
her auburn waterfall of hair, brushing, brushing.
Beneath her feet the prayer rug sits, its arrow pointing home.

Note: Dean Kostos, a third generation descendant of Genocide survivors, presented this poem in honour of his paternal grandparents at the 75th Memorial Ceremony of the Asia Minor Holocaust in Washington DC. A Greek translation of the above poem can be viewed here.
Ta plia!  Ta plia!  Voeethia! . . ." means "The ships! The ships! Help! . . ."

Source: Sarafian, Ara (ed.), Forgotten Genocides of the 20th Century, London and Reading: Taderon Press, p. 53-56.