…flashy little palomino filly, she finished in second. Tanya was beaten by young Cody whose grey stallion left everyone in awe. Cody and the stallion put together a run that many a horseman would remember years later. To say that it was flawless may be an overstatement, but it certainly was as good as they get. “Hey, nothing wrong with second place,” Joel thought as he heard Cody’s score being announced. Reserve World Champion sounded good to him. The pretty little palomino filly had done it all. She had shown the world what she could do, and so had her rider. Twenty horses and riders entered the ring for the presentation ceremonies. As they were called forward to receive their awards, Joel kept waiting to hear his name. Sitting side by side, astride their horses, Joel and Tanya kept looking at each other every time someone’s name was called. Finally, the announcer called the fourth place finisher, and it wasn’t Joel. He knew that the buckskin had a good run, but he obviously didn’t know exactly how good it was. And then, there was only the three of them. Joel, Tanya, and Cody. When Joel was called forward to receive his third-place ribbon he couldn’t help but cry with excitement, but no more so than when his young friend Tanya was called to be awarded the title of Reserve World Champion. As they watched Cody receive the World Championship title and start a victory lap of the arena astride his handsome grey stallion, Joel and Tanya directed their horses for the gate and to the holding area. With Cody celebrating his success, Joel leaned over to Tanya and said, “You did a great job with the little filly.” “Thank you Joel. I appreciate that.” Cody exited the arena and walked the grey towards Tanya. Turning the buckskin to meet up with Cindy, Joel whispered two words to Tanya, “She’s yours.” Joel acknowledged plenty of congratulatory words as he approached Cindy. Leaning forward in the saddle, he gave her a big kiss as she wrapped her arms around him. Dismounting to stand next to her, he looked Cindy deep in the eyes and said…
Rordan waited for an answer but none came. Ula merely smiled to see his thumb caress the top of her hand. Suddenly aware of what he was doing, Rordan withdrew his hand. “My problem was with my father,” Rordan said. “He used to get the local bullies after me just to toughen me up. Then when I wouldn’t fight with them, he’d beat me with a cudgel. I finally ran away and travelled with a surgeon to the south of France. I learned a lot from the Saracen doctors in Córdoba but I refused to become a Mohommedan and had to leave Spain or be made a slave. The only way I could return to Éirinn was to travel with soldiers, so the very life I wished to avoid was forced on me. Still, like you, I survived.” It was through singing that they came to a mutual understanding and respect. Ula had a beautiful voice and their harmonies echoed through the wooded hills. Sometimes they made up songs where Rordan would sing the first part and Ula would complete the phrase: Thank you birds … for your beautiful songs Thank you sun … for your warming smile Thank you trees … for your perfume in the air Thank you breeze … for blowing through my hair Thank you God … for bringing us together Rordan longed to tell Ula of his growing love for her but couldn’t bring himself to do so. What if she rejected him and thought him strange like Finten and the Brothers did? He didn’t want to lose their newfound friendship. Ula also had her own feelings of love but, for the same reason, couldn’t share them with Rordan. After four frigid months at the hunting camp, the band moved back to their home by the sea, convinced at last that the devil ship would not return. Upon arrival in the village, the community of Natives gathered to build a special lodge for the White Devils who had become Friends of the First Light People. Through the coldest days, when muted conversations and irritating coughs grated through the smoky lodges of the hunting camp, Brother Rordan had sat apart, whittling a piece of deer breastbone with a small flint blade. Now he presented a Celtic cross to Father Finten. For the first time the young poet could remember, his mentor offered genuine praise and appreciation, acknowledging this expression of his art. Finten raised his eyebrows, smiled, and took and blessed the cross. “This is truly beautiful, Brother. I think your cross should stand above the entrance to our lodge, that all may see the symbol and be reminded of our crucified Saviour.” The cross became a meaningful emblem, not only to the Brothers, but also to everyone in the village. When Bjorn and Ari expressed interest, Finten talked about Christ. The two Norsemen had been exposed to Christian teachings as children but had understood little. Finten was careful not to overstep the bonds of friendship by aggressive preaching. White Eagle and the First Light people had their own interpretation of the sacred symbol and likened it to the medicine wheel, which represented the sacred number four. White Eagle explained that there are four directions and four winds…
Modesty I don’t want anyone to feel the beauty I hide inside me no one can come near it without hurting it. I have a bloomed lily inside me without any shadow on its face it has never longed for lust nor ever anyone has kissed it. I have inside me a rose that balances on its own flame and as a holocaust it keeps silent and blesses. I have inside me an ambivalent daisy with its ever agreeing heart that sways in its loneliness and adorns its own beauty and I have other symbols flowers and others that intoxicate yet the most delicate ones bloom only in their imagination. The beauty I hide inside me no one ever will feel if one hurts it a fool he’d be and he won’t even regret it.
Visitor Old Chevy squealed frustration over the rough asphalt just outside the little town he reached at dusk. They noticed his laughter in the beer parlour and at the convenience store where he bought a pack of smokes. Molly felt overwhelmed when she looked deep in his eyes and by chance touched his hand. None ever called his name. Who was the unknown soldier who fought by our side in the battle for the spring song? Futility recommenced human history. Unaccomplished travesty when the next day on his way out of town a door slammed behind him and when they found him fallen in the middle of the street they knew he talked to our glorious ancestors just one stratum below the reality of his dream. The following Sunday Molly went to church dressed in her red dress and on her golden hair, the white scarf.
She bent her back to the task again, covering the seeds she had just planted with the rich loose loam. As she worked she let her thoughts drift. As usual they returned, like a dog gnawing on a bone, to both Rachael and Millie Harper. Tyne had tried, over and over, to leave them in God’s hands. But time after time, she had taken them back to worry over them herself, as if she could do better than God could in making things right for them. She felt a sudden longing to talk to the one friend who had been her closest confidante since the day they entered nurses’ training almost twenty years earlier. Maureen Hall, better known as Moe to her classmates, continued to be a constant in Tyne’s life, although the years had separated them in distance. Moe and her husband Ken lived in the city of Calgary, where they operated their own thriving plumbing business. Moe had left her work in the pediatric department of the Holy Cross Hospital before giving birth to her first child. Now Ken and Moe had two – Elizabeth and Brian – and Tyne wished the families could get together more often. She decided she would call Moe tonight when the kids had gone to bed, and the house was quiet. By that time, she suspected, the Hall household would have settled down as well. Again she glanced at her watch. It was almost half past three and the girls should be coming down the lane at any moment. She had expected Rachael to hurry the twins on their way when they saw the threatening sky. The older girl was as aware as anyone of the fury of a prairie storm, and Tyne trusted her to be responsible. Gathering her tools, she threw them in the wheelbarrow just as the sky lit up with a fork of lightning. As she hurried to the garden shed, she looked towards the lane. Relief flooded over her when she saw Susie and Katie streaking towards the house almost as fast as the lightning bolt. A thunderous roar overhead put even more wings to their small feet.
“Yes. A mile or so outside the village. His farmhand Bill Neely just left, so my father needs someone like you to do the things you’ve just told me you can do. You weren’t lying to me, were you?” “Oh no. I can find people here to speak for me. Even in Corrymore. My uncle, Seamus Slattery, lives there.” “Seamus Slattery is your uncle?” the girl cried in surprise. “My mother’s brother.” “I can hardly believe it. We lived with the Slatterys until I was six or seven years old. My twin sister, Nora, and I. My father wasn’t the kind of man who could raise two young girls on his own.” “You had no mother?” “She died giving birth to us.” “Oh, I’m sorry. My own mother died six years ago.” “And your father?” “He abandoned us.” “Well, if you’re Seamus Slattery’s nephew, you’re definitely hired.” She smiled at him again, but the frown still rippled his forehead below the yellow curls. She reached into the basket and brought out a light, golden confection. She held it out to him. “Have some yellow-man, yellow man.” “Thank you,” he said. He tried to pick a lump from the paper, but it was stuck. He had to hold her hand steady and pull the sweet, sticky pieces of confection apart. She looked at him and smiled at his serious face. Michael felt himself blush. “You have strong hands,” she said. “I’ve worked with them all my life,” he replied. He felt a quivering inside of him. He wanted to hold her hand again. “All your life,” she repeated. “You’re not more than twenty years old.” “Twenty-one,” he said. “That’s a long time to have worked with your hands.” She was teasing him again. “Twenty-one years of digging and raking and hoeing and ploughing. Twenty-one years of pulling flax and dipping sheep. And look what big, strong hands you have. What will they be like when you are eighty-one?” She had taken one of his hands in hers and was looking at it like a palmist, turning it over and back. “They’re strong hands,” she said. “Are they gentle hands too?” He did not know what to say. He looked at his boots; cow manure had caked on one of them.
I believe that what I’ve been through give me the right to get crazy. It would be some sort of relaxation a bit of irresponsible freedom that I’ve never experienced. Truly I’d go crazy, if that wouldn’t be considered as some short of a concession.
Walk by the Lake Fine silver clouds condense to raindrop soothe lines of your forehead amble the path next to the lake sidelining sawed up breast lonely singer forgets The wolf’s shadow is stretched by the brush and light the whisper of the tree leaves gnaw and tears of sun descend into your carved heart wound pulses your fear and its leaden color becomes the wonderment of eroticism suddenly vanishing
Pip: Manolis Aligizakis publishes the way some people breathe — steadily, in verse and prose, across centuries of Greek tradition and continents of lived experience, and apparently without pause.
Mara: That range is exactly what this episode covers. vequinox brings us poetry rooted in the Modern Greek tradition, fiction set in the rhythms of family and rural life, and prose that tracks what happens when people collide with systems, borders, and each other.
Pip: Let's start with the poetry.
Voices Out of the Greek Tradition
Mara: The Modern Greek poetry segment raises a real question: what does it mean to translate and present a tradition this deep — from ancient myth to twentieth-century masters — and keep it alive on the page?
Pip: The excerpt from Twelve Narratives of the Gypsy puts that question in mythic terms. The setup is a figure who outlasts every riddler sent to challenge her: "all the mouths which uttered the riddles were swallowed by the hungry Hades and she walked over their bodies."
Mara: So survival here is the answer to every riddle. The Sphinx-like figure doesn't solve the questions — she simply endures them, which is its own kind of mastery.
Pip: The Yannis Ritsos volumes — both Volume V and Volume VI — work in that same register of weight and endurance. Volume VI's "The Sick Man" watches darkness move toward naked figures and statues until it "lights the whole house" and transforms ordinary objects into something luminous. Volume V gives us a messenger announcing victory amid thousands of deaths, the king returning with "a wound between his eyes" through which death itself could see.
Mara: Introspection closes on a similar note of earned return — "from which I have come and to which I'll ultimately arrive at my destined hour." And the anthology Neo-Hellene Poets anchors that continuity in something smaller: a poplar tree that once answered laughter and now answers only tears.
Pip: Antony Fostieris offers the most compressed version of this whole project — a poem that defines a poem as simply "rhythmically contemplating emotion." Three words doing the work of a manifesto.
Mara: Opera Bufa, Nikos Engonopoulos, Orange, Entropy, Medusa, Yannis Ritsos Volume II, Tasos Livaditis, Cloe and Alexandra, Troglodytes, Wheat Ears — all of them circle the same territory: desire, mortality, the weight of history pressing into the present moment.
Pip: Which is also, it turns out, the territory of the fiction — just told in longer sentences.
Seasons, Soil, and the People Who Stay
Mara: The fiction gathered here under family and rural life isn't nostalgic so much as precise — these posts ask what it costs to belong somewhere, and what it feels like when belonging is about to change.
Pip: Still Waters sets that up in a single anxious domestic moment. Tyne has just accepted a marriage proposal, and the evening should be simple joy — but the excerpt catches her mid-hesitation: "I'm tired, that's all. Tomorrow, I'll be fine. Just let me go to bed now, and I'll be fresh as a daisy to take Cam to church tomorrow."
Mara: The gap between what she says and what she feels is where the whole novel lives. She watches her father take Cam's arm through the doorway and thinks "no more worries" — but the narration keeps undercutting her.
Pip: He Rode Tall trades domestic interiors for the arena. Joel and Tanya are in the finals, twenty horses, thousands watching, and the warm-up pen is almost meditative — he doesn't want nerves to make him overwork his horse before the performance even starts.
Mara: Swamped goes further back — two boys in a Cretan summer, watering tomato rows by hand, stealing a watermelon from a neighboring field, counting swims at the end of each day. Anthony selects the ripest melon by the sound it makes when tapped.
Pip: Prairie Roots does the same work in a Canadian winter register — stubble turned over, fences repaired, straw hauled to the barn, the first snow arriving before every chore is finished.
Mara: Jazz with Ella shifts the stakes entirely. The rural quiet is gone — the scene is an airport, a man named Volodya terrified at a security line, his companions forming a quiet circle around him. The question "what are they looking for" carries a completely different weight here than it does in a tomato field.
Pip: And then there's Wheat Ears, which compresses all of this into a short poem about a person who keeps urging change while never leaving the recliner.
Mara: The tension between staying and moving runs through every one of these — which is also what the next set of posts is made of.
When the System Pushes Back
Mara: The fiction in this segment puts characters directly against institutions, communities, and the small frictions that reveal larger fault lines — the question is how people hold themselves together when the pressure is social and the rules keep shifting.
Pip: In Turbulent Times sets that up through what isn't said. Caitlin learns that Connie has stayed behind at the cottage after Robert left, and Michael never mentioned it. The scene plays out in careful domestic choreography: "If Caitlin had had any suspicions about Michael and Connie Hanlon, remembering how Connie had come on to him in the square in Corrymore on Tuesday, she did not show them."
Mara: The restraint is the point. The whole excerpt is about watching and not speaking, suspecting and not asking — the farmhouse kitchen as a pressure vessel.
Pip: Small Change runs a different kind of social friction — street-level, adolescent, transactional. A kid who gets straight A's in a neighborhood of C-minuses rents out a Stilson wrench to Paulie, the local legend, for a buck an hour or any fraction thereof.
Mara: The negotiation is sharp and funny, but the stakes are real — belonging in that world means knowing how to do business without losing standing on either side.
Pip: Straits and Turns moves that immigrant-workplace dynamic into a Vancouver factory, where Mike writes a poem on folded toilet paper while waiting for Luigi to finish his shift tasks, and the Italian-Greek solidarity is summarized in a single phrase: "una fatcha una ratsa."
Mara: The Qliphoth takes the friction into something stranger — Lucas, trapped in what reads like a nightmare transit terminal, punches an iron pillar to test whether the world is real, and the guards and bystanders laugh in unison while a security conference crackles around him.
Pip: All four of these are about the same thing: what a person does when the system looks back and doesn't recognize them.
Mara: From mythic riddles to tomato fields to airport security lines — the thread connecting all of it is people trying to locate themselves inside something larger.
Pip: And the poetry keeps asking whether language is the map or the territory. Next time, we'll see where that question leads.
“Andrew McNeill, Dave’s grandfather, had the house built when he brought his young family from Scotland,” Penny explained as they made their way downstairs. “He spared no expense. Farming was profitable at the turn of the century and building materials were cheap. Dave’s father took over the farm from his father, then it was left to Dave to carry on when Dad died. Alan isn’t interested in staying at home to farm.” “But he seemed quite happy to be doing whatever he was doing with the tractor when I drove up,” Sarah interjected. “Oh yes, he’s a good help when he’s home. He still thinks of this as his home, and it will be, for as long as he wants it that way.” Sarah had been carrying little David in her arms but now, because he was beginning to fuss and squirm, she handed him to his mother. “He’s getting tired,” Penny said, “it’s nap time. Why don’t you go and sit in the parlour, Sarah, while I put him down.” “Thanks, but I’d better go home,” Sarah said, glancing at the watch on her wrist, “I’ve already been here longer than I intended. I’ve enjoyed it so much that the time has flown.” “But I haven’t had a chance to ask if you’ll come to the fall fair with us at the end of September.” Penny bounced the fussing baby on her hip. “I know it’s weeks away, but it’s the event of the year in Nimkus, and we start planning our exhibits early.” “Oh, do you exhibit?” Sarah asked, her interest piqued. Penny laughed. “Oh my, yes, I’ve become a regular country girl with my garden produce and homemade bread and canning. And Dave shows his best animals, wins lots of prizes, too. It’s fun, Sarah, we’ll have to get you started on it next year.” “I’d like that. Yes, I’d love to go to the fair with you.” She paused, then added, “Maybe Ben will go, too.” Penny shook her head. “I doubt it, he never does. But who knows? Maybe he’ll go now that he has you to go with him.” “Yes, I hope he will. I’m sure it’s been very lonely for him having only his mother for companionship ever since he was a very young man.” Penny glanced at her quickly, and Sarah had the momentary impression that the look was one of surprise. But she said nothing and, after warm goodbyes, Sarah went out to the yard where she found Flicka waiting for her. Alan had tied her in the shade of a large old maple near the horse paddock…