She serves with skill at the small café in rocky hills above
Naxos’ port. She opens the retsina with care, exposing
its pine-pitch aroma. Then comes the salad topped with black
olives and feta. She moves with Hellenic grace among
the hillside tables.
A rocky path leads to a marble ledge. Twenty-five hundred
years ago stonemasons struggled here to cut free a suitable
monolithic block. Sculptors began their arduous task. In their
minds was an archaic god: a boy with an enigmatic smile
standing straight and tall. But there must have been a fault
in the marble’s grain. Or a clumsy apprentice. Only a
weathered slab remains today.
We imagine the girl sorrowing for the fragmentary god to be.
And for the apprentice, most likely her ancestor.
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First published in Westward Quarterly.
David Stuntz was a poet, storyteller, avid hiker and dog trainer among other vocations. He was also a WWII Navy veteran and rose to second in command of a Destroyer Escort. David was a graduate of Harvard University, class of 1942. He passed away in December, 2022 at the age of 102.
Lightwood 