Orpheus the Xenophobe
the tears stain life
have you cried so much
and now your eyes are dry
oh women
of Hellas?
there where your eyelids fell
cypresses flourish
and always on their tops
a bird
Nikos Engonopoulos – Poems
Month: February 2026
In Turbulent Times
excerpt
…cheeks, his thin body and skinny legs with the handsome face and wavy hair, the strong, muscular physique of the young sailor in his dark uniform with the shiny gold buttons and the Chief Petty Officer’s cap. He knew then that Nora Carrick was his wife and not Joe Carney’s only because of a cruel intervention of Fate on his behalf. They were two young victims of a Greek-like tragedy. And yet he could not conceive of ever giving her up. She was his by God’s will, and He must have ordained it so for His own purposes. She was his too by legal right, and no one would ever take her away. Even though he knew she loved him very little, if at all, he himself would never be but deeply devoted to her, as much in love with her as she with the sailor who sat facing her across the table.
In early June, almost two weeks before the expected date, Nora’s first child was born.
I’m afraid that little Owen Joe, your godson, is not a very handsome little man. He most certainly does not take after his godfather. God forgive me, Joe, but he is the image of Liam. He has a little old face and a bald head. His feet and hands are much too long for the size of his little body. I think he’s going to be tall and lean like Liam. But he’s a sweet-natured little thing, smiles all the time and rarely cries. I love him, Joe. I give him all the attention I can lavish on him. He is my rescuer from insanity, for he distracts me from dwelling morbidly on the sadness of what might have been, a tendency I had developed near the end of my pregnancy and which was pulling me down like a weight around my ankles, deeper and deeper into a depression that might have driven me mad.
Fortunately I escaped what they call the post-partum depression. I was strongly expecting to give in to those ‘after-birth blues’ because my mother, surprisingly enough, suffered from them badly after my own birth. But I escaped. Thanks to little Owen Joe himself. Thanks to that long, lovely letter I received from you. You will never know how much your letters mean to me. They keep open a life-line of hope, something I can hold on to in the knowledge and assurance that you love me still in spite of everything. Oh Joe, I have such sinful thoughts about Liam sometimes. I can’t stop them coming into my head and I try to dismiss them immediately, but as long as they are in my mind I enjoy the prospects that they open up. It is very sinful of me, Joe. I know it is. But I cannot help it.
Liam himself has started reading up on diet and nutrition, on health and exercise and all that stuff. I saw him reading a book the other day called How To Survive Middle Age. Now he walks for an hour every day and does exercises when he gets up in the morning. He has cut down on his cups of tea and what he does drink has to be only half strength and without milk or sugar. His change of diet is a big help to…
Yannis Ritsos – Poems, Volume VI
Autumnal
The big leaves fall. The sea is angry. The guard sheltered
himself behind the wall so he could light his cigarette.
Whatever was to be said by the cloud, the man, the broken
car was at the mercy of the wind. Hou, houou, my children
under the soil, old women come with dead dogs, with
steel, the sewing machines are asleep inside the empty
houses, the newspaper is caught on the thorns. Ohou,
my children, you walked a lot. I must buy you new shoes.
I brought the most beautiful woman, there in front of the
lamppost. When the lights are turned on, you’ll see her
gathering the black buttons of your coats off the street,
the ones cut off by that wild distant irreversible gesture.
Life is a Poem
Time accepts me
I experience the attraction of the bodies
around me,
the breath of open windows,
the challenging night trains,
the asphalt warn out by speed,
the raging water,
waterfalls, avalanches,
twists in the scenes.
Time accepts me
holding me tightly in its dry palm
and takes me through ages
as if they were a Friday.
Love is my everyday clothes,
my free bloodstream,
otherwise this body wouldn’t have any breath,
glimpse, thought, rhythm,
molecules – I feel
it weighs me down –
it travels in its dreams
and how far it goes
where no wing has fluttered
and how childishly it strides
in infinity
in the then, in the there, and the will be,
shrouded in a moment of dismay.
Katerina Anghelaki Rooke – Selected Poems
War Calendar
13th DAY or ON LAND NOW
The heavenly fights descend to the ground
and Death returns to earth the place of its origin.
Bright flashes accompany Him
the only luxury left to the corpses.
Truly, how evil has changed direction!
The actions of Death commenced down
in the mud, in the hooves of the animals
the boots, the bog, then He climbed
to the black clouds and into the innocent souls.
And now in the desert
that I imagine with innumerable
rosy and sandy breasts
that breathe as they near death,
secretive body
with its dark oasis hidden here and there
uncommitted, like spectator of perdition
He became a parachutist to conquer.
Now the progress of bloody flesh
exists from top to bottom.
The sky, a fiery past
that will be forgotten
and good will be established on earth,
it will be buried deep, very deep in memory.
Introspection
Mu
I evaluated the weights and measures
of the world and found them unjust
wrongly made and unthankful
lacking the whiteness of a home
black stigmata on the wrong side
of the scale, the means used
by the money changer and the banker
measures of the embezzler
against the sunlit noon of June
and the sanctified bed sheets
of the newlyweds and
I said,
one day, new laws will replace them and
firm directions will be put in place
when Hades shows his face and
their means become useless
measures and weighs, unjust and
wrongly made like the echo
of a coin falling on a shiny pan
I evaluated the modern morals,
shiny, glittering and sexy
bodies and consumer goods
that turns youngsters into numbers
and consciousness into a desolate desert and
I found them dark and horrible and
spreading my glance over the horizon
into the unknown future, I saw
destruction and wars, hunger
and ugliness, and I saw the bank accounts
of the few getting richer
and other people’s earnings
becoming meagre and
I said,
The ineffable had other plans for
people on this earth, while
the ego and greediness of the selected
has changed the planet’s route
towards its destruction
I evaluated the minds and hearts of
the populace and thought of filling them
with love, tolerance, pride, and respect
for the neighbourhood thieves and
for the ambitions of the enemy
to balance the imbalance
I saw everywhere
Tasos Livaditis – Poems, Volume II
Long-listed for the 2023 Griffin Poetry Awards
Griffin Awards
“mother, I’m looking for the house”, I say to her,
“ok then”, she says to me, “put it on top of the side
table and I’ll take care of it”, the stoa was just lit,
the woman with her back in the side street; my brother
didn’t like the sound of bells nor her cheap cotton
pitiful panties, like the poor person’s song; the dog
was crying during the night and wanted to rub himself
on a ghost; the small room vanished in all this, the sign
pendulated in the air, girls with makeup reigned over
the stairway, untie Amalia, fearful of God, handled
the cartons almost perfectly and was often lost without
any trace however without ever reaching the beautiful
dimmed icons; it was a very dark night at Hagia
Petroupolis; the man with the music instrument stopped
outside the café, “you’re hurting me” she said to him
along with a bunch of new stories narrated in low tone
voice in the tailor shops.
Grant me, my Lord, a ripped page in every book and
this way I walked bravely like the corner of a house
at dawn or a woman who, with her breasts, pushes
sleep aside or the hands of the blind man conniving
with the fog.
I could, truly, narrate a lot of stories but I’m thinking
to what end since even the most innocent word is
unfortunately a goodbye repeated a thousand times
just before the accident
and the server spat in the coffee so he could double
his wages;
sleep with ravaged musical notes, a mix up of dead
keys
children’s letters to God thrown carelessly onto the
ground
and the drunk man walks awkwardly not to step
on them.
Swamped
excerpt
Another week went by in the usual office routines and house routines,
but when Saturday night came around, Eteo experienced another
first in his relationship with Ariana. He took her for dinner to
La Pergola in Richmond, where they dined on prosciutto and other
special salamis and antipasti, with the restaurant’s special bigoli pasta
as the main course, a rare dish in Vancouver that only this restaurant
offered. They also had an excellent bottle of Chianti, which perfectly
complemented the pasta and grated parmigiana. Ariana was as familiar
with pasta dishes as Eteo, but this bigoli was unique and
she exclaimed in delight when she tasted it.
“I’ve never tasted pasta this good, and we use pasta a lot in our
cuisine,” she said with a big grin on her face.
They were on the patio, birdsong all around them, and the food,
the wine, and the ambience made them both jolly and content. Above
them, in the heights of the firmament, a billion stars seemed to reflect
their jolly mood, dancing their twinkling celestial dance in the midst
of the great void.
“I haven’t been here for a long time, but their food is still …
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Jazz with Ella
excerpt
Shiny new ones from Germany and Japanese ones with colourful markings. He began to wonder if he had the wrong hotel.
Just when he considered giving up, maybe returning tomorrow, he saw her coming. She was a long way off, walking, not from the direction of the Hotel Rossiya, but from the direction of Red Square. As she got closer, he could see that she was laughing and happy. His heart gave a little lurch and she approached him quickly, still smiling. Wonder of wonders, she was apologizing to him:
“Sorry I’m late. We’re not staying at this hotel after all. We were taken to the Hotel Bucharest, way over there. I walked across a bridge…”
“Da, da, da,” was all he could think of to say, nodding and smiling in return. This was superb! Recovering slightly from his daze, Sergey linked arms with her like a sweetheart and they walked around the block, while Sergey ran through his various shopping lists. She interrupted several times to tell him that she hadn’t seen such an item or there was a good supply of the other. Eventually he gave her all the foreign money, which turned out to be $45 American dollars, a few pounds sterling and some West German marks, and she disappeared into the store.
“Ech, you dope,” Sergey muttered. “You could have offered her a drink or an ice cream from the stand…”
Once more he waited, this time choosing a different street corner, next to the GUM department store. He could shop at GUM himself later. The way he calculated it, shopping for goods like vodka and brandy at the foreign currency store would save him money because everyone knew items for tourists were at least four times cheaper than in their Russian stores—that is if you could find them in the Russian stores. Also, it would give him lots of time to procure out of stock goods elsewhere. The difference would probably pay for his wanton taxi ride plus maybe an evening at the restaurant…with Lona. Guiltily, he realized that he had been in Moscow for three hours and hadn’t thought once of Nadya, his sister. He should telephone her; she had a phone installed recently and he had the new number. There was a pay phone across the way, but the receiver hung uselessly. Some one had placed a sign “Not Working” and it looked as if the sign had been there for months. There would be public telephone booths at the telegraph office in back of the hotel and they would be in good working order. He slipped over there to make his call.
Übermensch
Impact
And since the new reality was upon us we truly
accepted it: our God was dead. Buried him yesterday
afternoon with no songs, no paeans, nor lamentations
and we felt a lot lighter. Nothing was as ticklish as
the mood of the somber day while fear, I’d say, was
hidden deep in our hearts. Sorrow reigned in the black
funeral home while beggars, outside, stretched their
hands asking for what we couldn’t spare: decency
of the new serpent who appeared without fangs,
feverish magnolia bloomed its purple flowers over
our nuptial bed and in an eyrie we filled our chalice
with courage and shipped it to the four corners of
the universe and promised never to be trapped again
in the idiocy of a system.
The Andean condor we declared heir of the flesh
the wind and the rain we proclaimed our catharsis
evoe, oh, free elements, evoe
multiply and conquer the earth someone said and
it was good
Manolis Aligizakis 