Wellspring of Love

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Excerpt

…friends she made last year – two teenage girls and a younger boy who
lived next door to Pa with their widowed mother. They’d grown very
close over the summer, and Rachael had been excited at the prospect
of seeing them again. What she hadn’t anticipated was that Pa would
marry the widow lady and take on those two girls and boy as his own.
Rachael kicked at a small rock and sent it flying into the ditch. She
wouldn’t even have Lyssa here this summer because her cousin was
leaving in a couple of weeks for Vancouver.
Lyssa had told Aunt Ruby she was going for a holiday to see the West
Coast but would come home in the fall. Rachael didn’t believe her. When
Lyssa got to the big city, she probably wouldn’t ever come home. When
she had learned that Rachael couldn’t go to Ontario, Lyssa had tried to
talk her into going to the Coast with her on the bus. How she would love
to do that, but her parents would never let her go even for a few weeks.
Seemed they didn’t want her to have any fun at all anymore.
Thoughts of Lyssa made Rachael remember the party at the
Harrisons’ tonight. It would be in full swing, and where was she?
Walking alone on a dusty highway on a beautiful evening at the end
of the school year. Oh no, she wouldn’t be allowed to go to Vancouver
– she wasn’t even allowed to go to her cousin’s grad party.
She heard a car approaching from behind but paid little attention
until it slowed and pulled up beside her. She looked up, expecting to
see one of the district farmers or a hired hand on his way to town. But
a thatch of red hair above a freckled face made her stop abruptly and
stare. Kevin. She had not seen him since the disastrous night of the
dance at Spirit Lake.
“Well, hello, sweetheart.” He grinned at her from the open window.
“Fancy meeting you here, and on a Saturday night. How come
you’re not at Lyssa’s party? Or is that where you’re heading? Hop in,
I’ll give you a lift.”
“No thanks, I’m not going. I have too much to do to go to parties.”
She started to walk on.

https://draft2digital.com/book/3562917

https://www.amazon.com/dp/1926763327

In Turbulent Times

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Excerpt

Ian buttoned his jacket, lit another cigarette and waited. His feet were sore and his calves ached. He shifted his position every couple of minutes. He thought: They can’t sit all this time on that concrete wall without their arses getting sore. He lit another cigarette. At his feet a litter of butts and grey ash messed the pavement.
The sky was darkening to sea-blue. A few stars twinkled.
At last they moved. While applause for the performance died to silence, and a low buzz of conversation replaced it, Nora and her friends slipped stiffly from the wall and stretched and put on cardigans. Ian saw Nora’s large bust below her blouse. She turned to the sallow man and said something. He replied and waved a long, skinny hand. The three girls walked away together along the path by the sea-wall and out on to the main road. They turned to the right in the direction of the Drumard Strand Hotel.
Ian followed until they had sauntered past his car. When he himself reached the car he climbed in and drove to the hotel by a side road that passed a row of private houses with gardens extending to the beach. It led him by the railway station and the bus terminus to the driveway of the hotel. He parked the car, combed his hair in the rear-view mirror, straightened his jacket and then walked casually into the plushy ambience of the hotel. It struck him as being somewhat old-world and serious but comfortable.
He entered the leathery den of the Slieve Corragh Room, where he had first met Nora and her friend. The bar was busy but not full. He stood in the doorway for a moment while the muted hubbub of voices and laughter and the warm smoky air drifted past him into the thickly carpeted lobby. He looked at the coffered, wooden ceiling, the white upper walls above dark, varnished wainscoting. A large painting of Slieve Corragh hung on the wall to his left. He felt at home here. This was his milieu. He strode across to the bar and sat on an empty stool beside a naval captain who had his back turned half towards him as he talked to a lady with a blue rinse in her hair.
‘Scotch and water, please. Glenfiddich.’
He waited. Out of the corner of his eye he could see the doorway. The anticipation and the Scotch and the aftermath of a mixed grill were teasing his stomach maliciously. He was acting like an adolescent, like a seventeen-year-old boy suffering his first unbearable love for the girl up the street, the skinny little girl in pigtails who had suddenly, without his noticing, grown into a woman. Ian’s knees were trembling. He gulped down the Scotch and ordered another.

https://draft2digital.com/book/3562904

https://www.amazon.com/dp/1926763270

Cloe and Alexandra

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The Yellow Cab
No sir, you confuse me with someone else.
It wasn’t I in
the yellow cab
I never sat with you in the back seat.
It wasn’t snowing either, I’m sure of that
no snowflakes fell on my hair.
In fact I have no hair.
You’ve never kissed me, I would have remembered of it.
But even if you kissed me, it wasn’t I you kissed.
Neither did the driver turn back his head.
Silently he crossed the lake to the edge
and from time to time he dipped
the oar in the black surrounding waters.

https://draft2digital.com/book/3562908

https://www.amazon.com/dp/B00FPRGYMQ

Introspection

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Theta

…and I said,
he is a hero, too, since he endured
human pain and
he loved the fragrance
of the night flower
which didn’t know of holidays
the sick man and I are comrades,
since we both experienced
the heroism of a twenty-four-hour duty
I practiced my religion
on the future catastrophe and
in the longing for the past
during which we endured pain
we, the youths with acne
and a light beard on our cheeks
us, who, one day,
will be called dreamers
and I said,
let them call me a foolish dreamer
let them name me crazy
let the joys of wealth be untouched
and let their glory be inglorious
I practiced my religion
on the perfection of human wholeness and
I hymned eternity with odes
Iota
I crafted iambuses about the cock

https://draft2digital.com/book/4118210#print

https://www.amazon.com/dp/1926763777

Jazz with Ella

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Excerpt

She took the elevator down one floor, intending to ask the dezhurnaya the location of Chopyk’s room but for some reason, that floor was unguarded. It took another 20 minutes of getting lost in a maze of hallways, returning to the lobby, inquiring and returning to Chopyk’s floor, only to find that he was not in his room. She rode the elevator back to her own floor, and the doors opened on a pleasant domestic scene.
The dezhurnaya no longer sat alone. On two straight-backed chairs sat a young man and a woman with her arms around a gangly child of about ten who pointed her toes, first right, then left, pressing her sandals into the worn carpet. The man looked up eagerly when the elevator doors opened. She caught his eye for a second, took in the freckle-faced child and petite mother who sat in the shadows, then sped on up the hall. But she could feel the young eyes boring into the back of her head.
“Attention! devushka, woman,” shouted the dezhurnaya. “You have guests.”
Even before Jennifer turned to face the family, it was a moment of knowing, a sense that already on this first night in Moscow profound changes would take place, and this was only the first of them. She stared. Yes, the man did look familiar in a comfortable way. The woman—his wife?—was a stranger. The child was awkward and cute at the same time. The man walked toward her, smiling, his arms outstretched in greeting. He struggled with her name in thickly accented speech.
“Do I know …?” she began and stopped.
“Mikhail Alexandrovich Abram,” he said, grasping her hand. The woman tossed a mane of glossy black hair and approached smiling. “And this is my wife, Marta, and my daughter Nadya.” The child stood knock-kneed, bowed slightly and touched the red Young Pioneer scarf tied around her neck.
“We are your family.”
Jennifer was thunderstruck. “But I have no family here…” she finally responded. She didn’t want to appear rude but she was quite sure that her mother…but then there was a lot she didn’t know about her mother’s background.
“Yes, you do. You are shocked,” Mikhail continued. “I beg your forgiveness for our sudden arrival. May we enter?” He indicated the hotel room.
“Certainly. Go in.”

https://draft2digital.com/book/3562892

https://www.amazon.com/dp/1926763246

Ken Kirkby: A Painter’s Quest for Canada

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Excerpt

…the hall where Karen and the crew were putting the finishing touches on
the exhibit. He was led to the Speaker’s office where Michael was sitting
on a desk, his feet dangling, telling stories to the staff of his adventures
in the Arctic.
John led Ken into his office and a photographer arrived to immortalize
the occasion. He posed Ken and John in front of the Karsh portrait of
Winston Churchill and for the next hour shot Ken with various members
of Parliament. Jean Chrétien, leader of the opposition, offered his congratulations,
as did Joe Clark, who was standing in for Brian Mulroney
who was otherwise engaged.
In the hall at the foot of the stairs people stood or sat shoulder to
shoulder. Not an inch of space remained.
I had the most amazing feeling. It was a feeling I have never had before
or since. It was a feeling that I was standing at a point in the universe where
for some minutes and seconds reality was different. This was the magical
moment I had been seeking my whole life. Usually, I had foreseen important
moments in great detail. But this one – this was different. This one had
somehow manufactured itself. It was not the vision I had had in my head.
John Fraser stood on the podium and spoke. “Almost fifty years ago
a young boy sat at the feet of his tutor – an old Portuguese fisherman –
and heard tales of whaling in the Canadian North. These tales were so
wonderful that the boy vowed some day to see Canada for himself and to
clarify his mental pictures of the land.”
“In his late teens, circumstance found the boy and his family living
on Canada’s West Coast and several years later he set out on his boyhood
dream to see the great Canadian North. For five years, he walked
from one end of this great land to the other, travelling with families of
Inuit as they pursued their nomadic lifestyle. Often he was alone, walking
endlessly – experiencing first-hand Canada’s Arctic North, all the while
sketching thousands of miniature drawings of what he saw.”
“Toward the end of his journey, like a great mirage in the desert, he saw
a giant of a man standing on the distant horizon. It was a stone Inukshuk,
an Inuit guide to hunting and fishing grounds. Try as he might for the
next twenty years, his efforts to portray the splendour of this vast and
spectacular landscape resulted in dissatisfaction and personal frustration.
Finally, he realized that only a painting which was larger than any ever
painted could properly depict the unseen spectacle which he felt compelled
to bring to the rest of the world.”
“The result of five years of trekking and twenty years of painting was
completed on June 21, 1991, the longest day of the year. It is the largest
original oil on canvas portrait in the world, measuring one hundred and
fifty-two feet long by twelve feet high.”

https://draft2digital.com/book/3562830

https://www.amazon.com/dp/0981073573

Neo-Hellene Poets, An Anthology of Modern Greek Poetry

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ANEMONE
A boulder on the hill
alone can see
the creek that flows
before it sings its song.
The anemone that blooms
rooted firmly on the rock
attempts to grasp
the meaning of the song
and down it bends to hear,
leaving its rocky anchor
to know what song is sung
by that fast-flowing creek?
It sings of an embrace
that waits with open arms
to hold a lover ardently
at night on a golden shore.
If only, said the flower,
that embrace were mine,
and leaning further down
to touch the rapid current
as it leaned enough to see
the water in its speed
stripped it of its petals
and down the stream it went.
Now without petals
the stem stands in loneliness.
Ah, why, ah, why did that anemone
deserted its anchor in the rock?

https://draft2digital.com/book/3562959

https://www.amazon.com/dp/1926763513

Orange

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Response
In the tempest’s wrath
I longed for
a glimmer of hope
in the heat of July
I seek the tanned
smooth body of the woman
and the north wind said
find your path
in your ancestor’s footsteps
lean and reverently lift
the marble over their gravesite
to feel their warmth and
I asked the southwest wind
where is my sunshine
and it said,
it hides
in your heart

https://draft2digital.com/book/3746001#print

https://www.amazon.com/dp/1926763750

Small Change

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Excerpt

Rick looked disconsolately through the second-storey classroom
window at sheets of freezing rain, the weathered fence of the Pennsylvania
Railroad coal yard and the blackened struts of the steel bridge that
shuddered ever so slightly when a train passed over it, then back at Sister
Assunta who was preaching, again, about The Immortal Soul as she paced
back and forth in front of the blackboard behind her desk, slapping the
pointer against her palm like a riding crop.
“Pagans!” she was saying, “You were all born pagans and you must
be taught to fear (her pointer hissed and snapped loudly against the desk
blotter) the power of Almighty God.”
Silence. Some of them lowered their heads to avoid her stare. But
Rick was puzzled. That kind old man who lived forever in the sky was
merciful and just. He was love itself.
Why should anyone be afraid of him?
He raised his hand. Forty-two pairs of eyes swung toward the front of the
room, afraid for him, but excited by the drama that might be about to
unfold. Sister Assunta merely glared and went on pacing, her voice hoarse
with a nearly demonic fierceness. Rick took his arm carefully out of the air.
“Daily, you neglect your immortal souls. They may already
be lost
to eternal damnation.” She stopped precisely behind her desk chair, her
florid minutely wrinkled skin drawn into a tight smile.
Rick tried to look inside himself. There wasn’t much light. After
a while he became concerned. Where was his immortal soul, anyway, why
couldn’t he find it? Then something
round and flat like a communion
wafer came into focus. It was tilted, like the head of a snare drum, and it
was so clean it glowed. He began to understand. When you did bad stuff,
soot fell on it out of the dark, then, if you confessed and said five Hail Marys,

five our fathers, and an act of contrition, an invisible power swept
it clean again. And immediately, almost automatically, his pubescent mind
reached for what he knew to be forbidden.
The kids called her The Beauty Queen. Her dad owned the bar and
grill at the corner of Monmouth and Fifth. She spent a lot of time with
her followers in the extra lot next to her house her grandparents
had made
into a large garden surrounded
by hedges, and dotted with trees. When
she came out for a walk, all the guys stopped what they were doing and
watched her tight pedal pushers, her graceful careless moves…

https://www.amazon.com/dp/1926763157

Yannis Ritsos – Poems, Volume VI

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Expectation
What are they waiting for in the morning, with the vertical,
snow-white, square, big planes, fully lit again this spring?
What does the child wait for by the window with his slaughtered
doll? Or the old man leaning on his walking stick in front of
the glass balcony door, above the noise, the city, the garbage
collector, the banks, the flower shop? That unrepentant
old man who enlarges, in the space, the hand of the woman
who spreads her laundry on the opposite terrace, which enlarges
the wet, red and white striped bed sheet so it covers two-thirds
of the city, thus trying to forget that passkey of the burglar, not
the passkey at all, the second key they presented to him
in front of the other, one for each, there by his door that still
smelled oil paint, and he didn’t consider complaining or
to ask.
In his pocket, he held tightly the bag with the nails, considering
The pictures he had to hang in the big empty house.

https://draft2digital.com/book/4278093#print

https://www.amazon.com/dp/1926763785