The tarnished stars above the names...

                                                  Jennifer Jones in "Duel in the Sun"

But on his grave they can't explain    
the tarnished star above the name.... 

Lorne Greene       

The cowboy Alan Ladd,
the punisher.. of the bad...               *movie : The Big Land
The invincible Apache
Burt Lancaster,
              [the scratchy.  
               
The bounty hunter*
            [Steve McQueen,                 *Wanted: Dead or Alive (TV series)
the fast Ringo,
          [the Lorne Greene.

The dueller in the sun,
Gregory Peck*,
         the number one.                     *Duel in the Sun
The man with true grit,
John Wayne,
           (they all admit).                     *'True Grit'

With those,
from Athens to Texas, flit,
even today with my whit...

Those of my childhood heroes,
those of my imagination
                           [superheroes.

      Now in the time of computers,
      those old friends,
                            [those shooters
      are back
             with memories of faces
      in a large number of places. 

As a kid I wanted to be a cowboy ...
My mother smiling was saying...
                               [surely my boy,
but you need to go to Texas for it,
and it's not someone I would permit.

I responded to her that I had friends,
cowboys and Sheriffs,
                               [grouped in tens
and another hundred will help....
Children's innocence
   [and intelligence of a whelp..
                         

   When I grew up I left my home
                               (a camper trailer)
     and became a professional sailor.

     I visited dozens of ports
                                 [and one day
     we anchored in Galveston Bay.

     Mother I'm in Texas I cried...

     but to find my friends
                          [in vain I tried.

     Her voice came from heaven sad.
     Sorry son,
          [but the news is bad, very bad.
     
     All your old friends are here
                                          [in heaven above
     Alive is only you and the dream you love ..
     __________________________________


* Extract from "The Broken Mooring Line", an experiential
poetic work // page c41 // e-mail: pmataragas@yahoo.com //
Texts and Narration: Odysseus Heavilayias - ROTTERDAM //
Language adjustments and text adaptation: Kellene G Safis - CHICAGO//
Digital adaptation and text editing: Cathy Rapakoulia Mataraga - PIRAEUS//
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Notes

Classifying Jennifer Jones has always been a problem, for feminists in particular. Duel in the Sun inspired Laura Mulvey to re-examine some knotty issues of gender identification, while Molly Haskell has written that Jones was unreal, “a confirmation of women’s worst fears of men’s most lubricious fantasies.” For Haskell, in other words, she was a man’s woman.
But what exactly does it mean to be a man’s woman, in the particular way that Jennifer Jones was? She’s neither tomboy nor career woman, and she couldn’t be further from a Hawksian sport. But, at least in the first half of her career, neither did she play a mother or sister or wife. Her gender role is formless, pure floating femininity—ungraspable, sometimes inadvertently smothering, but also prone to reverie, and teasing us with the possibility of transcendence. She apparently embodied these qualities in life as well. “Jennifer was able to merge her identity with the man she was with,” notes an unnamed friend in Edward Epstein’s Jones biography. “Her femininity was such that she allowed a man to feel more masculine.”

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the tales of a greek sailor