Full Moon
Nothing, nothing from you, oh sky,
anywhere I held, I tumbled noisily down
from your airy ceiling with the shells
the rusty bunch of your stars.
A disproportional moon rises inside me.
It swells dangerously on my hilltops.
It’ll rise a full moon that shatters me.
Berutiano
(Let’s not forget of Alfonso Allais)
I am flabbergasted by this girl’s vast knowledge! Is she from Cairo or Alexandria? I’d lie to you. Regardless, as she says, she completed her fine education in one European college (catholic of course) in Cairo or Alexandria. With such dedication and endless information, she talks of the teaching personnel and what she owes to them. Pere Magannat, mere Aklantan (Ann Merntez) and mere Vitsialis. The brother d’ Aisance! Fils Tik, doesn’t hesitate to add continuously and she teaches me of Europe with all its secrets and details, true European, even though she’s an Afrikaner.
202 WHEAT EARS
Festivities
There were many dead
those leaden days.
Sorrowful festivities
eulogies, priest always
controlled the tears of women
with his fingers signaling
in front of the altar
matins, red dawns
sometimes a lone crow
wished us a better future
amid prickly pear trees
while daffodils insisted
to always bloom come
each optimistic March
The Satrapy
How unfortunate, though you are made
for great and beautiful deeds
your unjust fate always denies you
encouragement and success.
Worthless habits, pettiness
and indifference distracts you.
And what a horrible day when you give in
(the day you let yourself give in),
and you set out on the road to Susa,
you approach the monarch Artaxerxes
who favours you with a place at his court,
and offers you satrapies and such.
And you accept them in despair.
These things that you don’t want.
Your soul craves other things, yearns for other things:
the praise of the people and the sophists,
that difficult and priceless “Well Done”
the Agora, the Theatre, and the Laurels.
Will Artaxerxes give you these things?
Can your Satrapy provide them?
And what sort of life will you live without them?
Excerpt
eating itself—has proved too much for him.”
“The poor man. What a horrible thing to happen at a time like this.” Father Costello then remembered the congregation in the church. “Dr Starkey, if you go back out there and try to restore a measure of calm, I shall prepare to celebrate Mass and marry the young couple. They especially will need some encouragement, poor children. I myself must try to make up to them this unfortunate delay in their happy ceremony.”
At the end of the ceremony, as the guests moved out of the church to make their way to the house of Michael and Caitlin Carrick, Father Costello and Dr Starkey both returned to the sacristy. Padraig was sitting on the bench, his head in his hands, staring at the floor between his feet.
“Are you all right, Padraig?” Dr Starkey asked.
Padraig looked up. His face was like a skeleton’s. “So I had another seizure?” he said.
“Yes,” Dr Starkey replied. “A bad one. How do you feel?”
“Tired. Very, very tired. And my head is throbbing.” Padraig looked up at the old priest who stood tall as a maypole. “Did you say Mass for me, Father Costello?”
“I did, Padraig.”
“And the wedding?”
“It went very well.
“Ah, that’s good.” Padraig lowered his black eye-sockets from the tall priest’s face and stared at his own moist, clasped hands. “I never could have done it, you know. I’m glad I asked you to come in my place.” His almost fleshless head jerked round towards Dr Starkey. “I’m so tired, Dr Starkey. I don’t think I’ll go up to the house. Will you apologise for me to Caitlin? And to Michael and the others?”
“I will, Padraig,” Dr Starkey promised. “Now you had better get to your room in the rectory. And I’ll stop by later to see you.”
“Thank you, Dr Starkey.” Padraig stood unsteadily. “All I want to do now is sleep.”
The three men left the church together. A few parishioners who remained in the church, talking in subdued voices, watched them go. Padraig entered the rectory with Father Costello and climbed the stairs to his room. There he rolled over on to his side on the bed and fell into a deep sleep.
Excerpt
…citizens as their wish and the iron fist of the church who keep the
minds and emotions of people under their control,” he said looking
deep in Magda’s eyes who showed her understanding as she nodded
her head and smiled at his comments.
“The one you’d have a hard time even talking about is the
power of the church over the lives of the people because it has been
so much entrenched in their essence as something they have received
from their ancestors and as such, they would never think of leaving
behind, let alone changing dramatically,” she underlined to Hermes.
“Yes, I agree; but what we inherited shouldn’t always be
accepted as a given and never evaluated, viewed by today’s standards
and beliefs and then accept it or reject it for something better. Think
of it, in today’s world, where you can communicate with anyone and
in such a short time, when you travel from one end of the Earth to the
other within a day, we still believe in such stupid ideas, and anachronistic
thoughts.”
“True, indeed, Hermes, but…” she added
“There shouldn’t be a but, Magda, look, in the old days, during
the seventh century BC, the Spartans had a law that forced mothers
to go and throw down the Kaiadas all their incomplete children, the
malformed, the kids with Down’s syndrome, etc. That was part of
our tradition too; however, we today don’t kill the malformed kids
or the ones with Down’s syndrome because we must understand that
human life is as valuable and indispensable, regardless of what form
it might have. Yet, we can’t get rid of the Christian tradition no matter
what. Tell me why it is so?”
Magda stared into his eyes and noticed the burning fire, which
could become a conflagration, a fire she loved to see; a fire she’d
agreed with, however, she chose her words very carefully.
“I believe what you said, but I also know how deeply entrenched
the whole idea of the church and how impossible it would be to effect
any change at this time of the nation’s history, especially under the
iron fist of the dictators…on the other hand, nothing is impossible
when one wants to fight for what one believes in.”
For the Dead Princess
I didn’t do this in purpose, I swear.
But as I saw her running
like a fairy towards me
I thought she would pierce my heart.
For this I shot the arrow.
After all we, the king’s hunters,
obey his commands.
The sign clearly read:
‘No princesses in the mulberry forest.
Sad Craftiness
The chimney, the church, the road, the tavern: familiar.
In the dark room, a fish swims in the glass bowl.
He, always alone, observes it; he isn’t paying attention.
The invisible, moving gleam of the fish and that sensation
of the lack of emotion. At least, a tiny numbness
at the edge of his toes, the untried laziness to move,
to turn on the light, or to stay down there on the imaginary
wheelchair, from where he takes out his left arm,
groping on one metal wheel as if holding the steering
wheel of an ancient, faraway authority, tired and
indifferent that doesn’t to be enforced upon anyone.
Thus, it is as if you hold the poem like a sworn secret
not to show that it also has nothing to declare.
The Dignity of Lives Deemed Incidental
The postman in Mail moves from house to house carrying news of marriages, births, and children living far away. For everyone else, he is the bearer of messages, while tears run down his face because he too waits for a letter that never arrives.
Here lies one of Aligizakis’s strongest poetic gifts: his ability to create an entire human destiny from a few concrete gestures.
He does not write psychological portraits in the conventional sense. Of many of his characters we know almost nothing. We are given an occupation, a gesture, a memory, an object.
The rest is accomplished by metaphor. The net becomes a trap. The rope becomes a life.
Bookkeeping becomes an account with death.
The felling of a tree becomes an image of our own disappearance. The letter becomes a metaphor for absence. The shoe becomes the sign that, for a little while longer, we may still walk upon the earth.
This poetic world is at once archaic and contemporary. Hades and Thanatos move naturally through gas stations, diners, hospitals, stock-market screens, garages, and Canadian immigration offices. For Aligizakis, Greek mythology is not museum material but a still-living language through which human finitude can be expressed.
The immigrant is therefore a particularly significant figure. In Immigrant, the protagonist leaves his homeland to begin a new life on the other side of the planet. He promises his youth and productive years to the new country in exchange for security—but the poem’s ruthless conclusion suggests that in doing so he has, in a sense, sold himself “for a few dollars more.”
This experience carries particular resonance in the work of a poet whose own biography has been shaped by emigration. Yet Aligizakis does not write autobiographical complaint. Migration becomes another model of the human condition: we all make exchanges with the world. We give time for money, freedom for security, dreams for predictability. The only question is whether we are aware of the contract we have signed.
The Incidentals is not a comfortable book. Nor does it wish to be.
It is often rough, grotesque, ironic, sometimes sarcastic. It refuses to beautify the body, old age, labour, or death. Aligizakis occasionally uses brutal language to awaken the reader from precisely the complacency he wishes to attack.
Yet beneath this harshness lies an unusual humanism.
Because if these people were truly incidental, no poems would be written about them.
Poetry itself refutes the title.
The moment the poet writes about Gladys, Mathew, Stefan, Benjamin, Galanos, or the nameless postman, he abolishes their insignificance. He lifts them out of the anonymous mass of time. Society may have counted them as numbers, but poetry gives them names, faces, stories, and deaths.
This is perhaps the most beautiful ethical gesture of the volume. Poetry cannot defeat death.
But it can defeat oblivion—if only for the duration of a poem.
Manolis Aligizakis’s The Incidentals is therefore far more than a collection of poems about ordinary people. It is at once a modern dance of death, a social diagnosis, a sequence of philosophical parables, and an ironic catalogue of human existence. The volume asks how many people live out their lives without ever daring to move away from the stake to which an invisible rope has tied them.
And it asks an even more difficult question: how long is the rope on which we ourselves live?
The poet cannot answer that question for us.
Perhaps this is precisely the point at which the stories of the „incidentals” cease to be the stories of others. And ours begins.
Balázs F. Attila
poet, writer, editor
Excerpt
The Nimkus Fall Fair proved a huge success. Even some of the
town matrons relented at the last minute, or at least before it was
too late to enter their exhibits. Most of them grew flowers and vegetable
gardens, and they could not pass up the chance to compete
against the farm women.
But this year, not only the town matrons participated. Miss Carrington
entered her crocheted doilies and embroidered pillow case
as well as a couple of jars of Saskatoon preserves. She also agreed to
be a judge for some of the exhibits, a prestigious job that had always
been reserved for two or more of the business men’s wives, or town
women from Bradshaw.
Millie Osborne was not to be outdone, either. She had worked all
through the previous winter and most of the spring, knitting socks
and sweaters. Her grown sons had laughed at her, asking if she was
trying to get in with the high mucky-mucks around town. But Millie
would not be discouraged.
“After all,” she told her boys, “Mr. Carson says I have to support
the Association now that I’m an Ag member.”
“Aw, Maw,” they chided, “you can’t compete with the biddies who
live in this town. They’ve been doing this stuff for years.”
“You mind your own business, you louts,” Millie said. “My things
will look just as nice and tidy as any others on display.” And they
did, as her boys were forced to admit when they saw them next to
other exhibits on the day of the fair.
Pong, the laundryman, did not have anything to exhibit but
he worked tirelessly all day, as well as the evening before the fair,
helping to set up booths, carrying and fetching, happy just to be of
service to Will and Missy Ben.
Holding the clipboard that had once been Will’s responsibility,
Sarah looked around her at the people gathered on the fair grounds.
Many greeted her with a nod or a cheery, “Good day, Mrs. Fielding,”
or, from the less reserved ones, “Hi there, Sarah, how’s it going?”
Was it her imagination or were there actually more people than
there had been last year? She saw Mrs. Thompson leading little David
McNeill by the hand, and walked over to them.
“I see you have your hands full for the day,” Sarah said, bending
to give David a hug.
Manolis Aligizakis 