Makherás

Yellow daisies in sheets over the green grass,

yellow cowslip-balls of flowering fennel,

yellow mimosa.  Other flowers, white and red,

pink, mauve, blue, but most yellow.  The plain

is streaked with yellow flame

which licks the lower hills.  As we mount higher

we lose the illusory fire—

grey rocks; bushes green, many-coloured, dark.

Once it blazed to heaven, this hillside, though.

English (not, heaven help us, many years ago

—five hundred years and more gone

since we burned the maid at Rouen)

drenched the brush with petrol round the mountain hide-out

of Gregory Afxendióu

—here, where now welcomed I admire

the lovely Cyprus hills, raised that sacrificial fire.