Anna's Taverna

Eating at the end of a wild Cretan beach

The end of June, 2023

Anna’s is an antidote

a release for fingers forged to screens, 

for tongues rigid with synthetic stimulation.

Anna’s is not ‘the next best thing’

serving so-called soul food,

or someone-else’s-street-food. 

Anna’s is the grit blowing from the almost road,

the broken chairs and wood-smoke,

the sweating knuckles of bone thrown for Pascal. 

It is the shattered toilet window,

the hornets in the waste bin, 

the dripping shower for wild campers (1€ please). 

There is no menu to post,

no menu to pull apart.

There is no menu. 

What do you know about restaurants?

Leave that on the beach.

Just arrive with salt stretched skin and feel the relief of shade.

Find a hard chair that works,

and let screaming cicadas blank out the world.

Realise the layers of distant mountains watching you.

For this moment,

you can sit at the end of this long, wild declaration of love

between sea and land and witness thier ecstasy. 

Notice the battered vans cowering under shoreline scrub.

Watch fragile bodies teeter over larval rock,

See glaring skin embraced by glittering water.

Take wine for the table and watch rolling beads ride the plastic.

A shock of tart juice that nevertheless sends alcohol to your overheated mind.

Good vaseline for your thoughts. 

Wait.

And wait for the moment to ask for food.

Or, be told when it is time.

Go to the kitchen.

Go gently into the dark, bare building with quiet gratitude and a smile.

Go and see the stews still in their aluminium pots.

Smell the fresh garlic and the simmering stock.

Watch Anna uncover sleeping courgette flowers, tightly packed yellow whorls, heady with dill.

Watch Anna. 

See Anna touch the dignified tools of her living, of her life.

Look past her stained apron and black Cretan uniform.

You will forget the features of her face, but not her gaze.

Feel tenderness for Anna’s hair curled softly by sea air and cooking oil.

Notice the crumpled narrow bed against the wall,

and feel grateful for this concrete shell that holds her now that her husband cannot. 

Smile at the nephews, local girls, nut-brown nomads

whose elbows work at the kitchen sink.

Their feet shift to the sound of her cry to carry plates through the heat.

Brace your ears as Anna claims each dish in Italo-Greek and Franglish. 

Choose one, choose them all,

The wait on your hard seat, with cicadas searing the air.

Eat, and feed your most human self.