DESPINA’S RUG 

by Dean Kostos

An original poem presented in honor of his paternal grandparents at the 75th Memorial Ceremony

of the Asia Minor Holocaust in Washington DC.  Dean’s grandparents were from Asia Minor. 

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 soil,

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, a 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 dawn,

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 round 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 marble of ruins.  Families crowded

velvet-lined opera boxes.  Camps dotted miles

of beach.  Hoards 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 rags 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. 

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