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.
Chaotic Light
I’m an imaginary list
of minutes, hours, years
and from the lava of an unsettled desire
many of my selves scattered
in the negative of time
my lives inside each other
Russian dolls
shared between the oceans
and the ancient landscape of the sky
that no one knows
that it belongs to the loneliness of the other.
I wish I could find a way
to stop from aging
the chaotic light of the poem
and the passerby
who unfurls his sail inside it.
Our Silence is Made of Voices
Our words and ideas
aren’t for the ears of others.
Their path is circular
endless
invisible
inscribed inside us
from the heart to the brain
and reverse.
(It has exquisite circular meanders
fully lit sauntering stoas).
Our words and thoughts charge,
press into the interior space —
and our words, whispers, or verse
we hear echoing inside us,
branch to the depths and feed us.
They add our innumerable voices
to our external inexpressible silence.
Morning in Salerno, III
A large explicit earthen pitcher
(nevertheless, always amorous) painted with
fleshy light blue and red flowers stood
in the middle of the street among the busy people
So that is the answer we had sought in debates
in museums in postponements and silences?
I retain this joy attached to my flesh like a handbook to discover
a speechless affirmation amid the awkwardness of words and deeds
I held up
this pitcher with my arms I brought it to my lips It was empty
An azure and a red flower fell into my two pockets They
didn’t wilt
Manolis Aligizakis 