Athena’s Blaze
Dedicated to Panos Kokkinidis and family
Amongst Athens’ top pastry chefs
Panos Kokkinidis
was spending a warm summer day near Mati,
a picturesque beach town, suave and lovely
on the Aegean shore of Greece.
He had mastered the art of fire
crafting innovational delicacies,
well-known with the Athenian literati.
So when the grey flames came blazing towards him
his wife, his children and his mother
he took his phone out and began filming
not knowing what he could be expecting,
he posted the agonizing video,
struck by this monumental inferno
a slithering colossal amber moving
like an incandescent dragon approaching
denser and closer
scorching the children and elderly first
threatened and afraid,
all scampered, fast
the somber smoke asphyxiating first
as the diabolical flares
crawled black into their flesh.
All dead.
Panos perished,
a burning man,
the flames had devoured their master.
A plastic dumpster melted in its own carcass
the fire had gone a Daliesque rage.
Scattered burnt doors still in fumes,
carbonized peeled cables
much like macabre carnations,
sardonic skeletons of electric metal boxes
dangled on worn-out weeping walls
their imperial power annihilated,
a waste of human sacrifice.
The tranquil blue now nags at the blanket of silver ash-dust,
why is its turquoise so arrogant, so indifferent?
Is there no suffering in this crystal sea?
The fire had devastated the lands
leaving nothing to soothe the empty hands
Death was irrevocable,
nothing to hang on to for rebirth,
not a thing not turned to ashes.
—
Karine Leno Ancellin grew up in New York until she moved abroad, earning an MA with Honors in literature at the Charles V Institute of Paris VII-JUSSIEU and studying “hybrid identities” for her Ph.D. at the Vrije Universiteit of Brussels. She is now a professor, writer and translator (English/French) living in Athens, Greece. Her articles and interviews have been published in the WIP, Kulturissimo, and other media. She is involved in the promotion of pan-Hellenic literature and co-founded a poetry society with Angela Lyras (www.apoetsagora.com). Her poems have been put to music by the Jazz composer Leila Olivesi.
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