A Mediterranean Matriarch
Poem by Effie Spence
I write when they wrought for water from a hand dug well,
my mother was born, Aphrodite, with Chalkidiki olive eyes,
and demanded nail polish from the age of five,
though she was born in her auntie's stone home.
I was born in a home of steel and western medicine,
the nurses all commented on my curls and lanugo.
I rested on my mother's breast while climbing into the cypress
and olive groves and memories of Grecian urns.
Suckled kumquats from my grandmother's garden,
she braided stories in my hair until she was forgotten.
I rest on shoulders of wide-hipped heroines,
who roll dough with elephant tusk hands.
I rest on sorrows from sowing fields to be traded
for factory textiles, milling flour to machinery.
I live in the sun in summers and see,
the golden hills that were once green.
But I am alive and proud of my team
of folkloric witches in my village, who believed
my eyes and my nose are of Great Alexander's bones,
his cradle beneath the marble stones of my grandfather’s home.
Effie Spence is an actor, filmmaker, and writer. Her style of art highlights the ridiculousness of life and her love of it. Having lost her beloved father at age 20, she understands and appreciates that she was lucky enough to even have a loving father, but also felt the deep pang of grief and had to ask herself the existential questions in her early adulthood. This led her down the path of experimental filmmaking, poetry, stoicism, nihilism, and, ultimately, back to her optimism.
