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There are more than 200 results, only the first 200 are displayed here.
When I first moved to Greece, my language skills were reduced to those of a three-year-old. The pain of this was exacerbated when six months after our arrival, my six and eight-year-old sons started speaking to each other in Greek.
The Greek population is trying to cope with the consequences of three decades of greed and irresponsibility. My middle son is in the Army; my youngest son is a fire fighter. Both have had their salaries cut by a total of 3000 euros for the year, and more cuts may follow.
Once upon a time a man told me that he had gone ahead and married his wife, even though he knew he didn't love her. 'But why?' I asked, mystified, for surely living with someone you are not in love with is the hardest thing in the world. 'Because it wasn't important,' he replied.
When you love, you must be prepared to die another death before you die your own. Five minutes before 19-year-old Aristomenis died, he called in at his mother's place of work to tell her he thought the exam had gone well.
Greek leaders condemned the outbreak of violence that has seen innocent people die on the streets of Athens. However many people fear that worse is to come. Most people are angry, particularly the young. Greece has never treated its youth well.
When such melancholy descends the only thing to do is walk. I fetched up near a chapel on a hill, for the village is ringed by chapels, six of them, in a kind of protective belt. Outside I found a gum tree and a Judas tree standing side by side: my life, or my two lives in a neat symbol.
Each unhappy family is unhappy in its own way. My family seemed happy enough, but when my mother died my father rejected his children. As I contemplated a reunion I wondered if he would recognise me. It had been seven years and he had recently been diagnosed with dementia.
My generation of Australians grew up with bigotry: the cordial loathing between Catholics and Protestants has faded only recently. But only when I married into a Greek family did I learn of the bitter and complicated antipathy of the Greeks for Albanians.
The first known suicide document is an Egyptian New Kingdom papyrus entitled 'Dialogue of a World-Weary Man with his Ba-Soul'. In 1996 my sister Jacqui killed herself. Three years later our cousin Andrew did the same thing. Suicide has always been part of the human condition.
In Australia it would beggar belief to see elderly nuns directing garden hoses against the fires that threaten their convents. But that is what happened last week in Greece. Australia and Greece resemble each other in many ways, but not in the way they cope with fire.
Malign influences seeped into the cracks that brain damage had caused, and in his mind flowered into poisonous paranoia. I found myself facing a most complicated bereavement: mourning the living is often worse than mourning the dead.
Les Murray describes himself as a poet who is religious rather than a religious poet, and celebrates a sense of wonder and mystery. In an increasingly secular age, poetry has a new function as an alternative or complement to religion.
169-180 out of 200 results.