The room with an earthen floor
was the warmest,
he helped his aunt sprinkle it with water
and sweep it.
Every night
he would stroll round the house and the garden,
he even remembered the holes from the nails on the
walls.
He would enter all the houses in Vasili,
count the steps to Kanakaria church
wander round the nearby villages.
When he saw on Google Earth the carob tree
where he would leave the tractor as a twelve-year-old boy
and run
first to the lentisk bush
and then to the sea
so as not to burn his feet
he wept bitterly.