Tumbling
Papers, rusted pieces of metal, rusted slogans, poems.
A vacant stool on the empty table, in the empty house.
You are familiar with them, you pretend you don’t know,
a bit more and you’d get fooled, you would fool,
you could praise someone; you could be praised (now without
a smile) it was your duty, you were saying, what duty? You
hide the hole with your body, while the around flags
get tattered in large, hollow single-coloured leaves.
Excerpt
But Ken Kirkby was thinking of far more than the painting and the
sheer audacity and will that had brought him here. His mind drifted to the
women he had loved and who had helped shape him and his vision. He
thought about his father and most of all he thought about Francisco, the
old fisherman who had told him tales of the Arctic when he was a young
boy. His imagination had fed on those stories. Through all the events of
his young life, the dream of the Arctic never died – it took him to Canada’s
far north and to adventures most people never imagined.
He thought about his heritage – the Viking blood that flowed through
his veins but perhaps most of all he thought about the people of the Arctic
– the grandmothers, the men, the women and children and the orphans.
Isumataq was for them – for their dignity, their freedom and their
own land.
Manolis Aligizakis 