Ilyas Papantoniou is an Egyptian-born Greek who arrived in Australia in 1962. He can’t survive a day without reading, though that’s not his only interest in life; he’d like to think that his work reflects his interest in the environment we all live in and how that connects us all. It’s been said that he is more curious than a cat – a description he is comfortable with.
This music reminds me of
narrow winding streets
asleep with time
in places i’ve heard of
dreamt of
never been
The streets where i started life
had dirt footpaths edged with granite
The buildings tall
teeming with lifetimes
not a tidy place
but you could say
it had character
I spent early years
walking watching wondering
memories of sights sounds smells
food that satisfied longings
even in a child
and all these other things
carried like a locket of memory
These streets echoed across
time and place
peopled from the seed
of ancient civilisations
blundering into each other
crossing lines
crossing lines where emptiness
even the expanse of deserts
or oceans clear like the sky
ships in between foreign lands
Our lives were like that
transitory
moving across continents
race memory and those far away eyes
grasping some small part of eternity
© Ilyas Papantoniou, 2021
be:longing 