Poetry: Sharing My Love of Sardinia

I lived from early 1969 to late 1978 on the island of Sardinia which is located in the middle of the Mediterranean Sea.  Sardinia is a very unique and beautiful place with glorious white beaches, incredibly clear, translucent, turquoise waters, moonscape mountains, and low lying rocks of multi-colored hues. 

The Sardinian people have been influenced culturally and through blood lines by the Moors and the Spaniards.  They can be very open and friendly just as they can be closed and very taciturn.  Sardinians are …… Sardinians!  They do not consider themselves to be Italian.  Their dialects, of which there are several, are said to be a language of their own and most Italians from the mainland cannot understand them.

For almost ten years I lived among them.  To this day I have friends there who would open their door to me in a heartbeat.  For ten years I shared the “island life” and Sardinia put her own special hold on my heart.  I returned to live in England in 1978 and two years later, as I sat among the concrete buildings of London’s City district during a lunch hour, these words came to me.

Island Voices

                          The voices of my island softly call me,

                   Whispering on the welcome spring-time breeze,

My heart responds so eager to their summons:

Come hither little one across the seas.

My eye half close and slowly she emerges,

This wondrous jewel that glitters in my heart.

No man can craft another in her beauty,

That God and Nature made a work of art.

And though she lies the distance of an ocean,

Her voices still arrive on spring-time’s breeze.

Persistently they call me to her bosom:

Come hither little one across the seas.

Margo Hay, 1980