Tell me about the afterlife
Anastasia Vassos's "Letter to Peter the Priest as He Awaits the Day of Judgment"
Among adherents of the Greek Orthodox faith there is a tradition of baking a coin inside a celebratory loaf of bread or cake on January first of each year. Known as Vasilopita, or Basil’s bread, that loaf marks both New Years Day and the feast day of the all-important Saint Basil the Great.
Whoever gets the coin in their slice, will have good fortune throughout the coming year, it’s said. Last year, at a holiday gathering in Cleveland, the coin went to Peter the Priest, Anastasia Vassos’s childhood priest and lifelong friend.
A short time later the beloved cleric died.
And Vassos was left to write a poem.
That, of course, is not an unusual response to loss for any poet. But Vassos’s choice of form was a brilliant stroke that resulted in a work that is nothing less than enchanting, even as it encapsulates decades of friendship.
If an elegy was the most obvious choice of form, Vassos took a different course and addressed Peter directly in a layered, often lyrical, and always wide-ranging letter.
“It was easy to enter the poem through the epistolary form,” she says now. “And I love asking the questions.”
Those questions, and their related images, span the long relationship, at least in my reading of the poem, alluding to everything from childhood mysteries to mature ruminations on belief and doubt. Father Peter, as he was known, became her priest when she was 12 years old or so, and remained close to the entire Vassos family right up to the day of his death many years later.
Along the way, the questions touch on gold hoop earrings, prophecy, both Saint Demetrios and Saint George, Greek Orthodox ritual, and the Boston winter, in a tightly organized (if seemingly random) burst of memory and mystery.
“If you see my parents tell them I’m sorry,” the letter writer says to Peter at one point, as he awaits the Day of Judgment. “Yes, I believe naming is praying,” she says at another.
Vassos, the author of two recent poetry collections—Nostos and Nike Adjusting Her Sandal—as well as numerous contributions to well-regarded literary journals (see her bio below), often draws liberally on her Greek and Greek American roots in her work, and “Letter to Peter the Priest as He Awaits the Day of Judgment” is no exception, concerned as it is with the legacy of the priest.
Along with Vasilopita, however, there is also a dose of ancient Greek mythology, a splash of fortune telling, and the experiences of a contemporary American still tethered in some ways to an older world, as well as the explicit Christian references.
One way that cross-cultural effect is embedded in the poem, although never mentioned, is in the way the late priest is named, Vassos said. His funeral service was conducted primarily in Greek, of course, but there was also some English translation. While he had always been known simply as Father Peter to Vassos and everyone else, in the translation from the service to English he became “Peter the Priest,” the name Vassos adopted for her poem.
The interplay of various images from various traditions also speaks to Vassos’s personal experience, she said.
“For me, it addresses the duality of my Christian upbringing with my questioning,” she said.
In most regards, she said, “Letter to Peter the Priest as He Awaits the Day of Judgment” arrived pretty much intact, although “I do tend to obsess over words, and line breaks, and order.”
But this time the tweaks were mostly minor ones. She started writing the poem on February 9 of last year, about three weeks after Father Peter’s death, writing in her notebook in longhand, as is her practice, and then editing on her computer. That entailed such small revisions as adding “still have” to the line about Aunt Helen’s earrings to fix the reference more fully in time, and some reordering of lines.
“And I added the socks and my spine,” she said.
Too, she found a good use for that unspent coin in Father Peter’s Vasilopita on January 1, not long before he died.
Without trying to retell the myth of the River Styx, she alludes to it to great effect in the final stunning line of the poem.
And the coin? Well, perhaps the reader will wonder whether that token of good fortune might be useful to pay the ferryman at that fateful crossing.
Here is the poem.
Letter to Peter the Priest as He Awaits the Day of Judgment If you see Aunt Helen tell her I still have the gold hoop earrings. If you see my parents tell them I’m sorry. My spine has herniated its disc and I wake in the middle of the night, askew. I wear socks to bed. But why am I telling the dead something they already know? Show me the profile of Jesus on this morning’s burnt toast, the Facebook post of the horse you rode in on the boat that carried you out. Show me the coffee grounds at the bottom of the cup, prophesy my future: the long journey through the mountains the stranger I’ll meet who’ll bestow a gift. In the Alaskan rain forest my friend Mistee cared for her dying father who kept smoking even as he lay in the unmade bed. After he died he sent her a crown of sonnets. I won’t ask if God exists, though I’m curious— when I pray I’ll name you instead— dear Petros, dear Rock. Yes. I believe naming is praying. Though you once said you are not a man of faith, I think that was just the blink of your eye— your hands and heart witnesses that Christ died for you. Tell me about the afterlife: do you still wear the collar? Those shiny clerical robes? Do you even have a body? Have you met St. Demetrios? Find out if St. George is still slaying the dragon, his horse bucking under him. Here in Boston winter has slid into habit, hurling rain and shadow shadow and rain instead of snow. The virus lingers, mutates. I’m left with the lamentation of the sky. I’m left with two gold coins I forgot to place on your eyelids when you fled. Tell me: is there really a river? —Anastasia Vassos Originally published in Lily Poetry Review
Anastasia Vassos is the author of Nostos (Kelsay Books, 2023) and Nike Adjusting Her Sandal (Nixes Mate, 2021.) Her poems have been nominated for the Pushcart Prize, Best of the Net, and Best New Poets. Find her work in RHINO, Whale Road Review, Thrush, Comstock Review, Lily Poetry Review, and elsewhere. She speaks three languages, and lives in Boston.
"Tell me: is there really a river?" This poem needs a sequel- his answer.
What a gorgeous poem! All of it, but especially (for me) those last eight lines. Thank you.