Elisávet Makridis
endangered dialect lesson (moaning woman)
I am teething on an endangered dialect.
Χεροπλύνω : In dreams of dilated time, I pour a lukewarm pitcher
over your knuckles.
Your lap’s charcoal buoyancy, the caves of your eyes.
For thirty-one summers, I enter the same Mediterranean
you bathed in fully clothed in your hundredth year,
Χαμοπετώ : happier than a scab’s bloated scintillations.
Χαβασλάεμαν : Matrilineal hunger is a preternatural worm
living off the intelligence of water. Ashes, ashes
of foliage & flesh. Listen,
it did not surprise me to learn there is a designated word
Χαξού : for the moaning woman in our language.
Taped above my desk, a 1914 photo of a murdered refugee,
in Turkey someone’s daughter splayed supine on the sand.
Χάγκισμαν : Inside the me before me, a moan prickles
like tightly packed hairs of fog. Transcends the holes
from which it is emitted, a riverine polygon
Χαντύλλιασμαν : flexing over empire’s gums. An inarticulate tickling.
When I search up the English etymology for ‘moan’
via Online Etymology Dictionary,
“c. 1200, mon . . . perhaps from an unrecorded
Old English *mān ‘complaint,’ from mānan,
a variant of mænan . . . also ‘tell, intend, signify’;
but OED discounts this connection.”
A flesh-memory flinches. What surrounds me now.
Not impasse, but crystalline pitch. A warning’s
pillowy axons. Lunar lawn of ripped skin. Tell me
tell me, moaning woman, the dark bog of your tongue.
Moaning Woman says, If you’re seen alone
in a tobacco field talking to a man, you’re better off dead.
You’re better off cocooned by the thrum
of your own juices. A stone’s wiltless grammar.
Says, I moved through the pain like an iron slug.
Syruped by the blade of my own unspooling. Seven births
in, seven deaths. I unbuttoned, then buttoned my dress.
I resisted till I felt vertebrae fission. My little bird,
Χασχιλάεμαν : somewhere inside the me before me, I was sold like cattle,
Χερόπον : discarded even by my mother’s small hand. In my throat,
the kernel in its infancy then,
a helical germ of breath reinventing
my marrow. I’m speaking to anyone who will lean in.
A moan is not endangered like our dialect,
& in this way shares more with the immortal
Χαντάκ’ : heart of a ditch. I peeled my arms towards
the Aegean to try to reverse the horrors of the daughter,
lethal water. Merciful water. Atop which dizzy bones bake
Χαντζέα : the smell of burnt feathers. A dorsal fin. The meat in my palms.
I can hear them, her. The sea’s blue
palpitations. A mouth, angling away.
Note: The definitions of the Pontic Greek words incorporated in the poem were sourced from Dictionary of the Pontian Dialect (2014) written by Miltiadis Kirykopoulos with the following translated definitions:
Χεροπλύνω: pouring water over someone’s hands to wash them; Χαμοπετώ: expression of great joy indicated via vibrant expressions and movements as if one is about to take flight; Χαβασλάεμαν: the pursuit to fulfill a desire; Χαξού: woman who constantly moans; Χάγκισμαν: moan; Χαντύλλιασμαν: tickling; Χασχιλάεμαν: violent expulsion; Χερόπον: small hand; Χαντάκ’: ditch; Χαντζέα: the smell of burnt feathers
Elisávet Makridis is a cross-disciplinary poet, educator, and Cornell MFA graduate where she taught for four years as an award-winning lecturer.