WEEKS LIKE THIS

Footsteps at six in the morning I am wakened by donkeys passing outside in the narrow stone paved street on their way down to the port i hear chickens and a rooster from the garden next door it is easy to go back to sleep

BY HENRY DENANDER

SWEDEN / USA 2005

Birds on the line

Like a poem in a mag
Like a writer searching for a tag
I have tried
all my ways
to end this

The telephone line that goes outside our house
also passes Ghika’s grocery store and turns and
continues up the narrow stone paved alley
passing Leonard Cohen’s house.

The wire hangs just outside the window of
the upper floor where he wrote “Bird on a wire”
while watching the birds outside on the
telephone line.

That was way back in sixties, at a time when the
phone numbers here on Hydra had only five
digits.

Now there are ten digits in a local number and
soon everything will be digital and wireless.

But that’s fine; the beautiful song is already
written and I’m glad my cell phone works
on this small Greek island.

Henry Denander was born in 1952 in Sweden. For 20 years he has worked on the business side of the entertainment industry. His poems and artwork can be seen in numerous poetry magazines, in print and on the web. Denander lives in Stockholm, Sweden and on Hydra, Greece with his wife and young son.