Notes

The poem comes from my sequence Black Light, which is set in Greece and is dedicated to the memory of George Seferis.

The title “Volta” means “evening promenade”, a custom equivalent to the Italian “passeggiata”. Everyone in the town goes up for a walk and parades up and down the main street. It operates in quite a few Mediterranean cultures.

The epigraph is from a poem by George Seferis.

“Eleftheria” here is a girl's name. It also means “Freedom”. The cry “Eleftheria i Thanato!” (“Freedom or Death!”) was the call of Greeks going into battle in the national  liberation struggle in the 19th C. - and also the defiant last call of men standing before Nazi execution squads.

The first line contains an embedded hint of the etymology of the Greek word for sunset: “O ilios vasilevi” means  “The sun (‘Helios’) is setting.” The verb “vasilevi” is of the same origin as our word/name “basil”, meaning “king”. So the etymological idea is “the sun is ”kinging / majestying / glorying” i.e. the sun is “in his kingship/glory/ majesty”