Repetitions
Repetitions
recurring events deaths
still you don’t dare
shake dust from your clothes
slit a new path for
rain the riverbed yearns for
repetitions of promises or vows
recurring battle victories
still you hold the sword
like an unspoken oracle
assume resolve in its edges
solutions in its skill to
truncate the early spring and
erase the word peace from your life
Excerpt
Harry leaned forward, simultaneously closing the open drawer in which his Tarzan book was hidden. ‘I will, Mr Anderson,’ he said. ‘Oh, Jefferson’s just called to say the copper piping’s on its way.’
‘Good. Lock up before you leave, Harry. And don’t forget the keys tomorrow.’
Ian left the office, rushed down the stairs, brushed past a boy with a grey Belfast Telegraph bag of newspapers in the hall and walked quickly round the corner to where his car was parked.
Crazy fool, he chastised himself. What a stupid, cock-eyed, half-baked, wild idea.
He cursed his cock-eyed, half-baked, wild idea all the way to Lisburn. But he did not stop nor turn around. He swung his car with violence round the endless bends of the narrow road heading south from Lisburn. Stone walls, hedgerows, fields and gloomy woods, small, reedy lakes and low, elongated hills blurred past. Occasionally he turned his head to view a farmhouse that he fancied, then jerked his eyes back to the drunken road, and swung the white-clenched steering wheel in fury, like a ship’s skipper in a storm.
Take care, Ian Anderson. You have to get to Carraghlin in one piece.
He stopped the car at a crossroads garage to take in a couple of gallons of his precious petrol ration, still in force two years after the end of the war, courtesy of the Minister of Fuel and Power. Then off again with a bound like a horse from an unbolted stable: up the long hill and down again, up and down, up and down, leaping over the rolling, rollicking, rock-littered countryside. Cresting the last hill, the sudden view of the distant Drumard hills struck him like a pie hurled in his face. At Tranaliskeen he saw the sea and the long, white line of a lapping wave. A few minutes later he pulled up outside the Seaview Restaurant in Carraghlin. He stared at the gloomy overhang of high hills, at the hunched shoulders and brooding presence of Slieve Corragh that overshadowed the town like the giant that threatened the village in fairy tales.
Ian entered the restaurant, ordered a mixed grill, and unfolded the morning’s Newsletter. Restaurants were exempt from rationing, which inflated resentment against the rich, who could augment their food allowance by eating out frequently and extravagantly. To restrict this resentment, certain rules had been instituted, such as no meal could cost more than five shillings or consist of more than three courses.
Excerpt
“Are you forgetting, Father, some of us might still like to find a way to get home?”
Finten had not forgotten about Éirinn and Derry and his home monastery, but
the fear of crossing that wild ocean was more than he could bear. Nor could he
endure the threat of marauding Viking pirates and slavery. “No, Brother, I have not
forgotten.”
Finten lied. He had not listened to anyone else’s wishes but his own. His days had
been filled with new discoveries; attempts to tell the Natives about the Christian God
had been unsuccessful.
“Brother Keallach, we have sworn to God, as missionaries, to spread the Gospel
and baptize. We must move on.”
“May I suggest, Father, missionary work takes great patience, and prayer. Perhaps
we are lacking in both.”
With that, Keallach hurried off to join the Native children in a game of ball.
Finten approached Fire Maker with the proposal that he and his companions
travel to the Mandan Nation. Fire Maker did not appear enthusiastic to have Finten’s
company.
“A man only makes such a journey once or twice in his lifetime. The journey to
my land might last five or six seasons. You will meet warriors on the way who will
not always be friendly. Some will threaten to take your life. They might succeed in
doing so.”
Fire Maker paused for Finten’s reaction. When there was none, he continued. “Are
you able to walk over mountains and through snow and cold water? If you are able
to keep up from sunrise every day until the sun goes to bed, then you might join us.
If you get tired or sick, we will leave you behind.”
“My God has brought me this far. He wishes me to travel farther, even five
seasons.”
Fire Maker shook his head but Finten had made up his mind and would not be
deterred.
The priest pondered informing the Brothers of his decision. What if they argued
to stay where they were? Would they even refuse to go with him? He decided to wait.
He’d tell them when the time came.
When winter turned to spring, Fire Maker and his daughter Yamka prepared to
leave. Rordan, Ula and Yamka began to talk of ways that they could remain together.
Rordan had grown more attached to Yamka than he’d ever wanted to admit. Ula
was like a sister to him but Yamka was so much more. Only when he faced the prospect
of her leaving did he begin to realize how much he couldn’t stand the thought
of losing her.
It was time to make a momentous decision. He had to inform Father Finten and
Brothers Keallach and Ailan that he was in love with Fire Maker’s daughter. Worse
still, he had to tell Ula. But of course, Ula already knew. How could she not? But then,
he had not even told Yamka. He’d only realized the truth when Yamka told him she
and her father would soon be leaving.
Crickets
The house is full of crickets
ticking like clocks out of rhythm
out of breath. And the years
that we live tick the same way
while they just keep silent
as though they had nothing to say.
Once in Pelion I heard them
digging a cave hastily
in the night. But now
we have turned the leaf of fate
and we’ve met you and you’ve met us
from the hyperboreans to
the negroes by the equator
who have bodies without mind
and who cry when they hurt.
And I hurt and you hurt
but we don’t cry, we don’t
even whisper, because
the machine is speeding
before horror and contempt
before death and life,
the house is full of crickets.
Moments
Just yesterday when
I saw her angelic form
through the open window
summer heat conspired
with her bedroom’s
privacy, loneliness
awestruck by her beauty
I couldn’t yet understand
until later in life I learned
the meaning of moaning
when years had turned
into brown dry leaves
blown by the wind onto
the sidewalk of life
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…
Prologue
…Only that the fools don’t sense you
the unjust and the dedicated to hatred
never let their tumbled glance reach you
their infected breath
the cactuses of their hands
the spider webs of their minds.
Your chaste people welcome the foreigner
when silently they drink the mouth of the sea and
eat along with the months
they touch your chlamys in the blowing out of the lightning and
their hands, petrified does, show you.
Familiar unknown.
Liantinis yet hasn’t said his meaning and his explanation of truth, the last word of GEMMA. At some time the fingers of time will laugh with the lot of unsubstantiated and foolish reports written and said about his life, about our common path and his final course of action.
However even then nothing will be changed.
~ Nikolitsa Georgopoulos-Liantinis,
Kifisia, 1st of June 2006
Manolis Aligizakis 