Tag: Poetry

Hours of the Stars

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Sirius
We saw her unfold the spin wheel of time
opposite the wind
and the pashas we saw
the beak of day touching her sun tied
on the iron stake of a rock and the eagle
coupled her sides. There she armed herself
while each of her gods stood forty yards high and
started talking to children and geraniums
at times even men got teary. Then you would think
they tossed barley into the fire or dice
on the chess of virgin Mary as
time takes away time and brings back
her sea-kerchiefs and the vigils of the north wind.
Time unfurls the flutes of colors and
the blouses of girls that into their eyes
convoys of birds and flowers travel.
At the lower levels the olive tree leaves
embitter us and at the higher level
pines breath signals a shiver
of guilt sprouting on her skin and platoons
of cypresses climb up the hill
as the hours start to blaze she offers
atonement libations to the fair weather; she assumes
the ephebe July and establishes the new crops like Aeneias
white horses thresh Logos and the golden plains
from end to end
fever spreads into her veins for hours and hours
like weather does to grapevines
that the performance of a group of disorder
appears straight by the edge of the precipice.
The hours stagger on their red heels and on their faces
intensifies the blushing aroused by their hearing
focused on the far away when silence
announces inexplicable oracles and
truth demands ransom as
years go by she becomes an orphan and
hangs over the waters when she seeks to
blindly attach herself onto something as
the camel driver gets fooled by the mirage
of the desert and assumes seeing far away
the sword of Alexander the Great pushed
into the scabbard of the Dead Sea.
We saw her floating over waters and ruins
like a big star when the mermaid
rejoiced in tearing up the forgetfulness
of the sea floor and during the night
Glaucus fought against the hours striking
them one by one over the castle of Astropalia
and the bell of Virgin Mary.

https://www.amazon.com/dp/1926763408

Ken Kirkby, A Painter’s Quest for Canada

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excerpt

The day before the exhibit, he helped hang the paintings;
only one in each room of the gallery. Opening night resembled a Hollywood
premier. People gathered in the street and, when a chauffeur
driven limousine drew up to the curb, the media descended. Ken parted
the crowd and opened the door, guiding the Duchess into the gallery. The
crowd inside fell back as though God himself had made an entrance.
Ken led her through the rooms, telling the stories of the Canadian
North. She nodded, smiled, listened attentively, and left as quickly as she
had come. Forty-five minutes later every painting wore a sold sticker.
Ken extended his stay, in order to accept all the invitations he was besieged
with. He had been in Madrid for six weeks, when his father called.
“You must come home right away.”
“What happened?”
“Just, come home immediately. It looks like the trust company has
gone under.”
He flew home the next day and took a cab directly to his father’s apartment,
where he found him more agitated than Ken had ever known him
to be. “This is real trouble,” he said. “We tried to get into the office and it’s
locked – the locks have been changed and nobody is there.”
In his own office, he discovered several key files missing. He arranged
a meeting with other clients of the trust company. There were rumours.
Some said the company principal had moved to the Fraser Valley, where
he had set up an Arabian horse farm and purchased a Rolls-Royce. Others
said he had simply vanished without a trace.
Ken called the RCMP commercial crime division and drove to the station
with his father. The officer explained that the department was aware
of the issue. “It’s a complicated mess,” he said. “We’re going to have to
investigate you and your activities, the same as everyone else.”
The police found many of the missing files but not a trace of the company
president and CEO. Rumours continued to circulate. One claimed
that the head of the trust company had had nothing to do with the missing
funds. It was Ken Kirkby. He was crazy, and smart, and out of the
country when disaster struck. He was the one who had masterminded the
plot. The media ran with it and reporters parked their cars and vans in
front of his house waiting for one glimpse – to take just one picture with a
telephoto lens. Two professional hockey players, convinced that Ken had
taken their money, filed a lawsuit. The judge threw it out of court. Ken
threw himself into the investigation, working with the police day after
day to piece together what had happened.
The RCMP interviewed the victims of the fraud and examined the
documents. Sorting through his own papers became a full time job, and
there were many times he gave up all hope of making sense of them.
His greater despair was the loss of his friends.

https://www.amazon.com/dp/0981073573

Nikos Engonopoulos – Poems

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Fellow Traveller in Melancholy
As she realized how much my tragic love for her overtook my heart, she invited me, among the ruins of the London Tower, for a cup of tea from the same hands, named by the killers of her lovers, depending on the season, sometimes “shovels”, other times “shiners”. She accompanied her offer with the only word she had kept inside her for years like something precious, she said, more than her life, like a secret gift of her breasts in the tempest of my lust. I raised my eyes and looked, as an unexpected shiver shook my body: she was naked before the year’s fountain, the fans of a nighty fire sprouted out of her belly and the wall was splattered with blood. I felt that the famous, “better tomorrow” had arrived, was a present reality. It was obvious that everything from the past was already erased, the nightmare of the tropics and the harbour had already vanished. I was a gigantic red eagle that saw, from a young age, the closing eyes of the opposite sun. She was the big, dark forest spread among the chandeliers, the chest and the big hallway mirror used for official palace events. Her thought was crown, her glance renaissance, her glance a beak. Her name was Rodamne. She had lived in faraway lands from where she had come to meet me. I told her I freaked out, thinking we hadn’t met earlier. How could she have, via the measure of the beautiful woman she was, replaced her eyes with two green Egyptian scarabs and she didn’t see me when I passed her? She had probably cut her long hair short so that the words that escaped from my mouth were one cathedral church built, for the only purpose of executing at the site and a specific moment, the unknown archbishop, and seller of small items, from an irregular Mexican squad. She didn’t talk, she didn’t stir, she only took in her embrace the flowers that decorated the room and scattered them in the fresh ravines, in orchards with the delayed hunter, at the foothills of the Memories Mountains. The candles burned joyously on the graceful bronze candelabras and the song she sang teary-eyed had the same meaning with the phrase “time for Shaba” in the Hebrew neighbourhoods of Thessaly cities.

https://www.amazon.com/dp/1926763734

Jazz with Ella

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excerpt

said Chopyk with only a hint of irony. He stroked his beard and stared at her with curiosity in his eyes. “I understand from Maria that you have a class scheduled for this morning.”
“Yes,” replied Jennifer tersely. Don’t explain, don’t apologize. Last night is none of his business. “I want to hear the students’ experiences in Leningrad. I have my own to share, too.”
“But I also know that you have been cancelling classes while in Leningrad….”
“As we discussed that first night,” she broke in quickly, starting across the lobby.
“Yes, agreed…but….” Chopyk followed, taking small, deliberate steps beside her. She matched his fussy gait. What is this nonsense all about? Surely he isn’t going to punish me?
“Since I have been carrying on with classes while in Leningrad for any who care to study,” he sniffed, “I think it only right that you should lead both groups, juniors and seniors, while on the Volga cruise.”
So that was it. Once again, he had hit her at her most guilty moment. He wanted to lounge on the sundeck reading his academic papers and not have to deal with a pack of rowdy students.
“Certainly. I’d be happy to do that,” she answered. “I know how one’s research suffers when class prep is a priority,” she added archly. He appeared not to notice her tone of voice. They entered the dining room in silence.
★
That morning she ended her class by presenting a poem that Volodya had written out for her: an excerpt from “Spring in Leningrad” by the Russian war poet, Margarita Aliger. Jennifer told the students the story of the Leningrad mother who had suffered during the siege and how her son, Volodya, had been moved by this poem. Despite her own sense of loss, Hank’s bad mood and Ted’s hangover, the students rallied and they recited it in Russian, then took a stab at translating it.
“O city without light, without water!
One hundred and twenty five grams of blockade rationed bread…
Savage rumbling of trouble
from the pitiless, dead sky.

https://www.amazon.com/dp/1926763246

Nikos Engonopoulos – Poems

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Dyadic Automation
Careful! Cover yourselves! Be careful! The blowing winds have already brought the mysterious messages to our ears. Everything around us is just another threat. There wasn’t any neighbourhood not blanketed by fear, each object hides a soul inside it. Come, let’s go. The time is now. The rusty weathercock calls us wildly in the night. The draw-well stopped and the blind horses became one with the begonia flowers. Let’s go, march! To go far away to Galvana. The saviour plank is hidden from the wind harbour of forgetfulness, peace is there. Sacrificial victims of love, ascetic wanderers of the night, proud dawn walkers light up the sea lamp. Whoever has the strength, whose heart truly dares, let him come. But let us not delay in futile reviews of the past. The time is uncertain. The roads aren’t safe at all and the flood drenched many places. The Caryatid girls have crowded erotically the dark ditches, the lustful maidens of our erotic years. Their famous smile flew away and now it blooms in some abandoned islands. The thunderbolt shows us the way. Let’s go! To the Lycaonian Galvana, there we shall rest. After our kind foreheads are decorated with rose flowers, we offer the libations due to the birds. There, in the graceful wooden temples of the old capital, we shall slaughter the young bull and a fiery column will spring out from its shed blood. There, wrapped around phallic banners, girls are more beautiful than sudden conclusions of dynamite. There lives the Hellene Pantelas among the wild Soudanese. The flowers there are wise and sunlit leftovers of dead beauties. The tears of the shark and the enigmatic prayer of Zacharia are useless there along with the frosty embrace of the penguin.
The erotic spasms of the last emperors and their fiery tears belong to the same person. The offer of the boatswain to the footprints of the hypotenuse of anomalous attractions is accompanied by the angelic harp, and our imposing stature means the spread of freedom and the longing for freedom all over the globe.

https://www.amazon.com/dp/1926763734

Neo-Hellene Poets, an Anthology of Modern Greek Poetry

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IV

                        Argonauts

And the soul

if it is to know itself

must look

into its own soul

the stranger and the enemy, we have seen him in the mirror.

They were good boys, the comrades, they didn’t complain

about the tiredness or the thirst or the frost

they had the behaviour of the trees and the waves

that accept the wind and the rain

that accept the night and the sun

without changing in the middle of change.

They were good boys, for days on

they sweated at the oars with lowered eyes

breathing in rhythm

and their blood reddened a submissive skin.

Sometimes they sang, with lowered eyes

when we passed by the deserted island with the prickly pear trees

toward the west, beyond the cape of the dogs

that bark.

If it is to know itself, they said

it must look into its own soul, they said

and the oars struck the gold of the sea

in the sunset.

We passed by many capes, many islands, the sea

that brings another sea, gulls and seals.

Sometimes grieving women wept

lamenting their lost children

and others angrily sought Alexander the Great

and glories lost in the depths of Asia.

We moored on shores filled with night fragrances

with bird chirps, with waters that left on our hands

memory of a great happiness.

But the voyages did not end.

Their souls became one with the oars and the oarlocks

with the solemn face of the prow

with the rudder’s wake

with the water that shattered their image.

The comrades died one by one

with lowered eyes. Their oars

point to the place where they sleep on the shore.

No one remembers them. Justice.

https://www.amazon.com/dp/1926763513

Ken Kirkby, A Painter’s Quest for Canada

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Excerpt

“That’s an awkward and difficult subject,” she said. “I don’t want to talk
about it right now.”
Miloo became the central focus of his life and as their friendship deepened,
Ken confessed that he liked her – but far more than the word implied.
He liked her very deeply.
“You can’t like me that much,” she said. “You come from one world and
I come from another and there is no hope that we could ever be more than
just passing friends. It would be nothing but trouble for everybody.”
Ken felt a familiar rebel anger stirring in him. “Why? Did somebody
make a rule?”
“Yes,” she said. “Those are the rules.”
“But if the rules are bad, do you still accept them?”
“It’s everybody,” she said. “It’s everywhere you turn. That’s the way it is.”
“Well, I don’t accept it.”
“You’ll get into a lot of trouble.”
“I don’t care. It seems that all the best things in my life are trouble and
I just won’t accept it.”
Ken’s father noted the growing friendship between his son and Miloo.
Perhaps thinking to distract him, he asked him one late summer day what
he would like for his next birthday. Ken opened his Michelangelo book to
the photograph of David. “I want to see that,” he said.
“Why that?” his father asked.
“It’s probably the most perfect thing I have ever seen. It has only one
flaw.”
“And what’s the flaw?”
“Look at his hand,” Ken pointed to the picture. “He’s holding a stone in
his hand and that’s the stone he was putting in a sling to throw at Goliath.
Everything else is perfect but this hand is weird. Why would he do that?
Why would he make such a strange hand on such a beautiful body?”
“I don’t know,” his father admitted. “So, that’s what you really want to
do?”
“Yes. I want to go to Florence.”
On the morning of his thirteenth birthday, he and his father boarded
the train to Italy. In Florence, they stepped into a line that seemed
to stretch to infinity outside the gates of the Accademia delle Belle Arti.
Slowly the line inched its way to the spot where the colossal 17-foot statue
towered over the crowd. Ken wanted to feast his eyes, but the relentless
throng forced him to walk by it after only a passing glance.
As they left the museum, his father asked, “Did you like it?”
“How can you look at something that way?” Ken asked. “I want to
spend a lot of time there.”

https://www.amazon.com/dp/0981073573

Ithaca Series, Poem 705

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a second

My hands are cold.

                                              I’ve gone out into the street,

I’ve settled the minor matter

and returned home to take again

my place at this table.

                                              I then discovered

the coldness of my hands,

                                              a sign

which disturbs me perhaps without justification,

it’s just a little thing to have cold hands.

This cold of November

is in my hands, nothing else.                

                                                              It’s me:

I see the simple Greek vase

and the usual evening around me.

But it’s very rare for me to have cold hands.

In a fleeting second, my thought has seen

the probable fog, the filled out gray leaf

where the name I have would be crossed out

with the frosty ink of the end.

ΔΕΥΤΕΡΟΛΕΠΤΟ

Τα χέρια μου είναι κρύα

                              βγήκα έξω στο δρόμο

να ταχτοποιήσω κάτι ασήμαντο

γύρισα σπίτι κι έκατσα στο τραπέζι

                               Τότε διαπίστωσα

πόσο κρύα είναι τα χέρια μου

                                σημάδι

που μ’ ανησυχεί ίσως δίχως λόγο

ασήμαντο να `χεις κρύα χέρια.

Το κρύο του Νοέμβρη

στα χέρια μου, τίποτε άλλο.

                                Εγώ είμαι:

Βλέπω το απλό Ελληνικό βάζο

και το συνήθες βράδυ ένα γύρο μου.

Μα σπάνια έχω κρύα χέρια.

Μια φευγαλέα μου σκέψη παρατηρεί,

μες στην ομίχλη, το γκρίζο φύλλο

με τ’ όνομα μου ξεγραμμένο

με την κρύο μελάνι του τέλους.


Μετάφραση Μανώλη Αλυγιζάκη//Translated by Manolis Aligizakis

Antonio Cabrera, Spain, (1958 – 2019)

2024 Books by Manolis Aligizakis

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Κοιτάζοντας πίσω το 2024, διαπιστώνω ότι ήταν μια πολύ ενδιαφέρουσα χρονιά. Ασχολήθηκα με πολλά, συνεργάστηκα με πολλούς ανά τον κόσμο, και με τις μεταφράσεις εκδόθηκαν 11 βιβλία μου σε 4 χώρες και γλώσσες του κόσμου. Η εργασία μου αναγνωρίστηκε με το ειδικό βραβείο ποίησης του 2024 από τη Διεθνή Ακαδημία της Κραϊόβας, στη Ρουμανία κι επίσης κατέληξε στη βραχεία λίστα των βραβείων Zbigniew Herbert της Πολωνίας. Εύχομαι σε όλους ένα χρόνο γεμάτο φως κι απεριόριστη δημιουργικότητα /// Looking back at 2024 I realize it was an interesting year. I worked on many projects, I co-operated with many people around the globe, and including translations I had 11 books published in 2024. My work was recognized with the Special Poetry Award by the International Academy of Craiova, Romania, and was included in the short list of the Zbigniew Herbert International Literary Awards, in Poland. I wish all my friends a year full of light and endless creativity.
2024 books by Manolis Aligizakis
INCIDENTALS, poetry, Ekstasis Editions, 2024
SAVAGES AND BEASTS, novel, Libros Libertad, 2024
TWELVE NARRATIVES OF THE GYSPY, poetry by Kostis Palamas, translated by Manolis Aligizakis, Libros Libertad, 2024
SHADES AND COLORS, poetry by Ion Deaconescu, translated by Manolis Aligizakis, Libros Libertad, 2024
COURAGE OF THE MOMENT, poetry by Marian Rodica, translated by Manolis Aligizakis, Libros Libertad, 2024
LIFE IS A POEM, poetry by Coman Sova, translated by Manolis Aligizakis, Libros Libertad, 2024
WISDOM OF THE NUDE, poetry by Manolis Aligizakis, ENEKEN, Salonica, Hellas, 2024
CAMOUFLAGE, poetry by Manolis Aligizakis, translated INTO Romanian by Larisa Caramavrov, International Academy of Craiova, Romania, 2024
ALCA (CAMOUFLAGE), translated into Hungarian by Marta Gyerman Toth, ABART, Hungary, 2024
ANTONY FOSTIERIS-SELECTED POEMS, translated by Manolis Aligizakis, Libros Libertad, 2024
ENTROPY, poetry by Vasilis Faitas, translated by Manolis Aligizakis, Libros Libertad, 2024

Twelve Narratives of the Gypsy

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Oh, my black mule you didn’t

get any of your father’s noble

fate with the dashing body

and from my mother, I didn’t

accept the scornful serenity,

you said to me, I’m not the slave

of a slave. I know it well, oh,

my black mule, you are you

you selected two of your

mother’s and your father’s fate

and you chose your destiny

and if you aren’t as graceful

as the waves nor the bravest

and if you aren’t a stooped slave

and a tired maid who awaits

and endures, beauty has turned

you into a thoughtful being and

if you never said no, you did

because of your stubbornness

not from a peaceful submission.

You’re always strong-willed

always first always the same

in rivers and thickets and

on the road and in the noisy

harbors as your steady step

deserves a light, graceful wing.

And if I urge you to descend into

the Tartarus of earth you’ll

always obey and I won’t even

feel the trembling of your legs.

And if I wake up longing for

a skyward voyage inside of me

I’ll ascend to the stars with you

while your steady steps will

guide me up to that height and

I’ll see you as the winged horse

of the magician or the leading

black guerrilla, unbending

barren and stubborn mule.

You and I, both of us, one Fate.

And if I stirred the leaders’

armoury with my hands and

I fluttered the soldier’s banner

and my uncontrolled hair

as if I was again commencing

a new battle, as if again

I was ready for long wars

and lance competitions

and wherever I passed along

domed forests of high-joined

chestnut trees and hugging

poplars I pushed my mule

gracefully riding on her back

I was the mule-rider who

touched the domed forests

raising my arms and then

going forward or coming back

I always carried leaves and

fresh branches in my hands

and wherever a river stopped

my steps, I disregarded its

powerful current, mule-rider

who I was, I started crossing

in a fastened path that lasted

only while I was passing; and I

was a river passer, a mule rider

an engraving on the rock

mule and man, the same flesh

different from the stone, which

assumed a soul and departed

if I was lost in the deep thought

of struggle, pain, and yearning

in my mind the one emperor

having a crown on his head

the crown of the universe.

https://www.lulu.com/account/projects/gjgv4ee https://www.amazon.com/dp/B0D3LP7NW6