Dimitra Christodoulou was born in 1953 and studied law and literature. She is a secondary school teacher who has published seven volumes of verse and one of prose. Poems of hers have been translated into several languages and published in Greek and foreign literary journals and poetry anthologies.

Dimitra Christodoulou, Just Before, Nefeli 2005, p. 71

DOMESTIC TOURISM

They left us here with our baggage
But there is no service back home.
Desperate we ask here and there,
All shake their heads without speaking.

How come? It’s there on the map.
Stars mark its mountains,
The darkness soaks its streets,
Its mud sticks to shoes.

In our parts night never falls.
Scorching sun, throngs of people, dust.
You construct, are reduced to perplexity,
Feverishly reconstruct, but nothing.

We ought to be able to return.
Running water, peaceful sleep,
Breathing from conscience’s void,
We grew up very slowly back home.

Now the bags grow old in the Departures
Though the loudspeakers insist that,
Other than what is explicitly published,
There are no other destinations.

Why on earth did we come this far, after all?