The latest fancy sweeping the media and some economic observers has Greece breaking away from the euro and reinstating its old national currency, the drachma. Ah, the drachma. Brings back memories, for some, of good economic times — cheap retsina, sun-basked islands, hotel rooms at bargain prices, and Leonard Cohen.
Dance on the money
the heads of presidents
red toenails
this ‘poem’ is an I.O.U.
for 10,000 drachmas
on your step-smooth shoulders…
Sinking under needles of bazouki
you threaten us with jobs in the Sahara
or a salary of halvah
oh the hair is real
that pilots the thighs
into the important satin theatre
ruined like Greece by overuse
but all we have of the Golden age
Your courting clothes sleeping in cedar
your grandmother still alive on Hydra
‘Don’t tell her that you saw me naked’
No idea what that means (from a 1972 Leonard Cohen poem titled The Energy of Slaves), but those who think bringing back the drachma will revive some golden age of Greek economic achievement and get Greece and the international banking community and its army of political back-stoppers and back-stabbers out of their debt crisis has spent too much time out in the Mediteranean sun.
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