The Drachma's Owl Closes

Lyrics

January first.
Two thousand and two.
A new sound in the pocket.
A new kind of light.

I hold you in my palm.
One hundred drachmae.
Not the ancient tetradrachm, but its child, its echo.
Your little owl, a faithful copy
from the fifth century before the common story.
Athena's bird, wide-eyed for all the long years.
All the markets, all the hands, all the bargains.

And here they come.
Crisp and strange.
The bridges to nowhere, the windows on nothing.
The new euro notes, smelling of ink and committees.
They feel cold in the morning.
Not like you, worn smooth by two millennia of worries and wishes.

And the oldest name in Europe goes quiet.
Two thousand, five hundred years ends as a memo.
The Prime Minister says you are no longer tangible.
And the owl on the coin closes its eyes.
The owl on the coin closes its eyes.

In the villages, the Yiayia squints at the numbers.
The shopkeepers run two sets of prices in their heads.
The men in suits speak of a historic moment, a monetary union.
But the printers who ran the last sheets of Apollo...
we don't know their names.
We never do.

A name is just a breath.
A coin is just a promise.
But what a long promise you were.
A silver thread running from Pericles to Papantoniou.
On February twenty-eighth,
they cut the thread.

I'm putting you in a small wooden box now.
Next to a seashell and a river stone.
The owl is sleeping.
The oldest name...
Drachma.