Eternal Cycle
Earth distances itself in time
growing old in the enigma
it crosses silence
half reflection and half hour
returns all the shine it took
and when the invisible
signal occurs
it embraces
each on his path
to find what it always longed for
Betrayal
Though we can praise Homer a lot, there is one thing
we do not admire…Nor do we approve of Aeschylus when he writes that
Thetis says Apollo sang at her wedding and foretold
the good fortune of her offspring and his long
life free of illness. Then said her fate was
blessed by the gods and sang paeans to her joy.
She believed that Apollo’s divine, unerring mouth,
full of the art of prophecy, could never be wrong.
“Yet, he, himself… who sang the hymn…
he killed my son.”
Plato, Republic B’
When Thetis got married to Peleus
Apollo stood up at the splendid wedding table,
and wished the best to the newlyweds
for the son that would be born from their union.
He said, “Sickness will never touch him
and he will enjoy a long life…”— when he said this
Thetis was overjoyed because the words
of Apollo, who knew all about prophesies,
sounded like a guarantee for her child’s life.
As Achilles grew up, and his beauty
was the pride of all Thessaly
and Thetis remembered the words of the god.
But one day, old men came with the news
that Achilles had been killed at Troy.
Thetis tore off her purple garments,
took off her bracelets and rings
and threw them to the ground.
And in her lamentation, she remembered the past.
And she asked what the wise Apollo was doing,
the god-prophet who sang so eloquently
at banquets, where was he, when
her son was killed in the prime of his youth.
And the old men answered that Apollo,
himself went down to Troy,
and there with the Trojans, he killed her son.
Finally the plane broke through the cloud banks, the turbulence vanished and the sight below pushed all thoughts of adolescent students out of Jennifer’s head. She was flying over the birch forests and ragged patchwork fields of the mighty Soviet Union. She gazed eagerly. An image formed easily in her imagination: two young women—her mother and her aunt—thin and desperate, still grieving the loss of their parents, tramping across this very landscape in 1945 following the path of the victorious troop convoys. How far had they walked to the Polish border? It must have been a wearying journey for the two refugees…
Suddenly a wedge of apartment blocks appeared on the horizon signalling the suburbs of modern Moscow. The plane circled once, the wing dipping to reveal wide straight highways, clusters of huts amid evergreen trees, and finally, the runways of Moscow’s Sheremetyev Airport.
“Hallelujah, we’re really here!” Paul exclaimed. Eve and Dawn giggled. David opened his eyes. A wave of relief flooded the passengers as the plane bumped to a halt. Applause broke out. One stewardess allowed herself a thin-lipped smile while the other busied herself in the galley.
The thunderstorm’s humidity hit them the moment the cabin door opened. The summer air was moist and the black clouds still rolled overhead, but for the group from Canada, now shuffling down the steps to the tarmac, no amount of bad weather could destroy this imperial moment. For some, such as Maria, it was a return to the land her parents spoke of, though not always fondly. For others, Jennifer included, it was their first glimpse of a powerful myth. She had never understood Winston Churchill’s quote about Russia—”a riddle wrapped in a mystery inside an enigma”—and suspected it was hyperbole, but as she stepped from the plane onto Soviet soil, she shivered. Churchill had met Stalin. He should know.
What was this country all about? She had first come to know it through the literature of long dead authors, Pushkin and Dostoevsky, considered dissidents in their time. Lately she had come to understand its dark underside through the secret writings of Alexander Solzhenitsyn, banned in the USSR, published in the west. Yet she had also studied its most glorious moments in the ecstatic language of its revolutionaries. Despite the ordeal of the landing, she felt eager, charged, ready to go everywhere, to see it all.
The Club
Winter began. It rained constantly. This was the regular Vancouver weather: rain and rain again, and when one surely suffered from boredom, it rained some more. It only took a few minutes for one to get drenched. Just like today, when he was at the train yard on Drake Street, where they maintained the train engines of the Canadian Pacific Railway Company, one of the biggest in Canada. It was so quiet that one could only hear the mechanics’ voices in the shop. The labourers outside were performing their duties to prepare the engines for another day before they would leave to pull the passenger train carrying passengers or the freight train carrying goods across this great land called Canada. These yard engines also needed their regular maintenance and there were times when one of those was parked on a line, waiting for its turn to get into the shop; and while the engine was waiting to get inside and get repaired the engine was on, burning fuel for hours on since as one mechanic put it once, it was better to have the engine running rather than risk of the engine being unable to start once shut off.
Mike was standing behind the fogged-up window and looked at the yard where the rain kept on dripping, steadily, quietly, poetically, he’d say, creating a sound, subdued sound, almost melodic, a sound of this world, a song one would sing, as the lone mechanic at the coffee house looked into the pages of a Penthouse magazine with the beautiful female bodies, almost naked, and his saliva was dripping out of his mouth. They had nothing to do for a while, until the three engines that pulled the passenger train arrived to get serviced…
Manolis Aligizakis 