“Here, we can hear God’s voice in the tree tops, in the rippling waters, in the cry of the loon. Until you can lower yourself to our level and treat us as equals, there’ll be very little dialogue.” Father Finten fled to walk alone in the woods. Now Ailan came to find him there. He had heard the conversation with Keallach and decided this was the best opportunity to confirm what Keallach had already said about the relationship between priest and Brothers. “I have been wanting to talk to you, man to man, not as penitent to confessor, for a very long time, ever since we first came to these shores. You are a hard man to talk to. I do not want your judgments and I do not need your approval. I want your trust and your love. You call me Brother but what does that really mean to you? Am I like your own flesh and blood, or are you just being a distant father? Because you are older than I, does not mean I should call you Father. Show me real love, and I’ll gladly do so.” Now Finten felt totally lost. He was unable to speak the thoughts that raced through his mind. Ready to explode with grief and outrage, he turned and walked quickly until he was deep in the forest. He needed time to think. Finten did not return for the evening meal, not for prayers or bed, but stayed away all night. Trusting that their priest would come back when he’d had time to think these conversations over, the Brothers decided to overlook his absence. When Finten did return to camp after three days, he did not say anything about what had happened. The Brothers respected his silence, waiting to see if there’d be a difference in their relationship with him, and life went on as before.
He stopped abruptly as a male voice from amongst a group of men near the door hailed him. Looking decidedly relieved, he excused himself to Sarah and hurried away. She stood in the middle of the room, unaware of the people moving around her. The day was not going at all as she expected. She wished she hadn’t come. Perhaps Ben had been smart, after all, to stay at home. Whatever he had done to alienate the people of Nimkus had obviously cut deeply. But she could not understand why they should take it out on her. She became aware of people staring at her so she walked away, and eventually made her way outside to the fair grounds. No one, except a little oriental-looking man, spoke to her. Struggling to manoeuvre a table through the door into the agricultural hall, he flashed Sarah a huge smile. “How do, missy.” Sarah vaguely remembered the sign on a shack at the end of the main street, declaring the presence of Pong’s Laundry. She felt the urge to run after the man whom she knew must be Pong, and offer to help him with the table. After all, apart from Will, no one else had shown any friendliness towards her this morning. With nothing better to do she decided to go back to the livestock area and watch Dave show his animals. Picking her way through the people gathered on the fairgrounds, she noticed a group at the grandstand near the ball diamond. She walked over to have a look. Young men, some in their late teens and others a little older, had already begun a game of baseball. They wore no uniforms, and the few baseball caps amongst them did not display any team logo so Sarah could not tell which districts they represented. A man leaning on the end of a bleacher seat smiled and moved aside to let her get a better look. Sarah, interpreting his move as a friendly gesture, dared to speak to him. “Can you tell me what teams are playing?” “Colson and Ryerson districts,” he said, turning to look at her. “You not from round here then?” “Yes, I live in the Colson district, but I haven’t been there long. I doubt if I’d know anyone on the team. Are they the ones at bat now?” “No, the ones in the field. They have a pretty fair team…
They were marvelling at the line of diminutive Inuksuit that curved along the water’s edge toward a far-off boulder that seemed to reach almost fifty feet into the sky. The Inuksuit told a story, Ken said, and after a lunch of fresh fried fish he led them toward the boulder. As they walked the boulder diminished in size until they stood beside it and found it was about three feet tall, pink, perfectly smooth, and resting on top of an immense gray rock that had been partially heaved out of the tundra. “This is a fishing Inukshuk,” he told them. “It tells you that this is a good place to go fishing. How does it say that? If the fishing is good, the Inuit take a stone out of the water and put it on top of another stone with little Inuksuit leading the way. A passerby who had never been in this land would know immediately that he could catch fish here. Other configurations of stone describe what kind of fish are here. Essentially, this is a language.” He explained that the permafrost lurks just under the surface of the tundra, and below that lay thousands of feet of ice. The ground above the permafrost where the ice melted consisted almost entirely of rich humus built up over eons by the tiny plants that grew and died there. An eightinch tree takes hundreds of years to grow to that height in the Arctic’s short season. The fibres of the humus stretched out along the surface and down to the permafrost, siphoning the water from the ice and sending it into the atmosphere. As the wind travelled across the surface of the land in buffeting gusts, it created rudimentary magnifying lenses of the millions of tiny water bubbles streaming into the air. The farther away you were from an object the more lenses you were looking through and the larger the distant object appeared. That night after supper he walked down to the dock with a fly-fishing rod. Arctic grayling congregated in the shallows here and after a few causal casts, he landed a fine three-pound fish. As he unhooked it and slipped it back into the water he noticed Karen sitting on an overturned bucket at the far end of the dock. “I’d like to try that,” she said. He handed her the rod and described the process but even after all these years he still had no idea how to explain that it was a line with no weight and it needed to fly guided by minimal strength and energy, and perfect timing. She cast a couple of times and smiled. “I like this,” she said and while the fly lay on the water, a large grayling took the bait. Ken disengaged it, gave the rod back to her and left her to sort out the tangles and continue casting. He sat on the overturned bucket at the far end of the dock and watched.
THIS IS DEEP MEMORY. Childhood. The South Beach summer house on Staten Island. Late light fades from the sky, the window, the upstairs bedroom where Rick lies under a cool sheet, watching the stars come out, listening to silence. Slowly, as his mind opens, the heavy stillness after rain dissolves into small sounds. A breeze sweeps through the willow and sighs off over the glassy skritch of crickets, tree frogs like a troop of wet grace notes, the faint hiss of traffic on wet pavement from Hyland Boulevard, and beyond that, far away, but close, too, like the pulse of a double bass, the sea builds to a rush and subsides, again, and again, with a soft crash that makes him think of God and time without end. Then, below the open window, it begins. Tentative chords from his father’s guitar. Three clear notes. A fourth. A fifth. A melody takes shape, picked up by his uncle Vincenzo’s mandolin. It’s lazy at first, until his mother’s clear soprano joins the strings. A male voice comes under it, then another, and a song rises to full strength, steered off and back by the wind. He smiles to himself. It’s what he was waiting for. He rides that comfort into dreams. Rick sits at the oval table in the kitchen with his colouring book. He is trying to keep the slippery crayon tips inside the lines. At the other end, his father and his uncle Vincenzo are playing a game called briscola. They study their cards then slap them down hard enough to make them bounce off the coarse grain of the wood. Sometimes they shout at each other, but he knows it’s for fun and their raised voices pass over him without breaking his concentration. As he works, he can hear his grandfather, Arsenio, talking back to the radio in the front room where his wife, Theresa, argues good-naturedly
…after chores and supper, for a few hours of fun. When the moon illuminated the snow on crisp, clear nights we would run and play and wrestle on the snow banks, or in the straw piles created by the threshing crew. After getting our fill of the night air it would be time to thaw out with hot chocolate and finish the evening off with a game of cards. And then the walk home to be in by ten o’clock and to bed. This too was an experience in the winter. After our second house was built our bedroom was the attic itself, unheated except for whatever warmth found its way up the narrow stairway. So the first one in warmed up the bed and resisted sharing the heat with whoever was to share that bed.We slept in pairs, compatibility being established by various methods including by dictates from the parents—when all else failed. And it failed often. Scraps broke out on minimum provocation and disagreements could last an hour, a day or weeks. Piling into a cold bed with a brother who was after your hide was risky business. You were as likely as not welcomed by a smelly fart which stopped you from getting your face under the covers to take advantage of body heat. Instead it was necessary to tuck the feather tick tightly under the chin to prevent any vapours from escaping upward, at the same time to gently lift the edge of the tick with a foot to provide an outlet for the smell. And no touching or bedlam would break loose and one or the other would be downstairs pleading his case in long johns before the court of last resort, mother, to be specific.Mother’s justice was gentle enough and, by comparison with Pop’s justice, downright benevolent. Pop would resolve our disagreements by following a policy of no-fault resolution or, to put it more accurately, all fault resolution whereby we were all equally guilty and therefore all received equal punishment. It worked. We usually went to mother to be the mediator. At least with her we were given a chance to develop our case. There were many things one could not do in our attic bedroom. One could not take a glass of water up to the bedside; it froze by morning.One could not kick off the covers; one froze by morning.
Pip: Manolis Aligizakis has been quietly building one of the more unusual literary archives on the internet — translations, original poetry, fiction spanning centuries and continents, all landing on the same site like it's nothing.
Mara: vequinox is behind all of it, and today we're covering the range: modern Greek poetry in translation, a wide stretch of literary fiction and drama, and poems that sit at the intersection of love and loss.
Pip: Let's start with the poetry.
Voices From Modern Greek Poetry
Mara: The question this cluster of posts raises is what modern Greek poetry is actually doing — what it reaches for, and what it refuses to let go of. The anchor here is Katerina Anghelaki Rooke's "Unexpected Development."
Pip: She sets it up plainly: "It was when words overflowed / images flew like wild birds / that refused to feed on words / even if they were hungry for them."
Mara: That tension — images that won't submit to language even when they need it — runs through the whole collection. Anghelaki Rooke is mapping a kind of loss that precedes grief.
Pip: Antony Fostieris takes a harder geometric line in his selected poems: a snake eating its tail, beginning collapsing into end, the body always absent. Tasos Livaditis, longlisted for the 2023 Griffin Poetry Prize, closes his poem "Coincidences" on the line "music in the beyond / that seeks what poetry silences on earth" — which is either profound or a very elegant shrug.
Mara: Nikos Engonopoulos writes about Georg Trakl — a poet who "never agreed with them" and whose only longing, once he understood what it meant to be alive, was to escape. Yannis Ritsos, the Neo-Hellene Poets anthology, Hours of the Stars, Orange, Ugga, and Troglodytes all appear here too, each finding a different pressure point between the lyric and the world pressing in on it.
Pip: Fiction carries some of that same weight — let's go there.
Literary Fiction And Drama Across Time And Place
Mara: What this range of fiction shares is an interest in pressure — the moment a situation tips, when a character can no longer hold the ordinary shape of their life. Straits and Turns is the anchor, and it earns it.
Pip: The excerpt follows a couple and their dog Elvis through a cancer diagnosis and a slow, careful goodbye. The prose doesn't reach for drama; it just watches. "Two days went by. The situation worsened. They called the vet, who suggested that perhaps the cancer metastasized from his bladder to his bones, as it was statistically the case in most of these dogs."
Mara: What that sentence does is hold clinical language right next to love, and the gap between them is where the whole excerpt lives. The decision not to pursue chemotherapy, the daily medication ritual, the final day when Elvis doesn't touch his food — it's a portrait of grief that arrives before the loss does.
Pip: Jazz with Ella moves in a completely different register — Cold War tension, a border crossing, a woman watching a man she's trying to protect navigate an interrogation line. The stakes are geopolitical, but the writing keeps its eye on the human pulse of the scene.
Mara: Fury of the Wind is quieter — a community fair, a husband and wife negotiating small social obligations, the ordinary friction of a marriage visible in a single exchange about who covers the preserves booth.
Pip: Redemption takes a young man named Hermes Dragakis back to his village with a diploma and a scholarship to Canada, and the scene where the mayor tries to understand what an economist actually does is somehow both funny and genuinely moving.
Mara: In Turbulent Times goes somewhere more intimate — an Irish drama of paternity, secrecy, and a woman who tells a man quietly, "You let me down, but I forgive you."
Pip: Wellspring of Love watches a woman named Tyne move through her sleeping children at night — each child rendered in a sentence, the accumulated tenderness of a parent who has already known loss. Blood, Feathers and Holy Men puts a monk named Rordan in early medieval Ireland, furious that the Church buries medical knowledge while people die of infected throats. He's not wrong, which makes it worse.
Mara: Arrows delivers its moment in a single blackout — a priest counting the dead, touching foreheads, finding one name missing. Savages and Beasts opens on a murder inside a residential institution and the slow, formal way the news spreads through the building. In the Quiet After Slaughter follows a bush pilot whose final chapter is written in retrospect, quietly. The Unquiet Land gives us Caitlin and Michael on a clifftop after something has broken, and Caitlin describing a dream of the sea gone still and black "the way the world will look when it's ended and we've all gone."
Pip: Poodie James puts a police chief in a room full of political pressure, defending a hobo from a sabotage charge with nothing but logic and a flat refusal to perform certainty he doesn't have. Twelve Narratives of the Gypsy and Marginal round out the theme — the first a lyric sequence of departure and transformation, the second a short, still poem about absence that ends on silence mimicking footsteps. And Ubermensch contributes a poem called "Funeral" — a poet buried while the hawk watches and the wine flows and someone begs for two bits at the edge of the scene.
Mara: The emotional through-line from fiction into poetry is loss — anticipated, survived, or simply witnessed. That's where the next segment lives.
Poems Of Love And Loss
Mara: The question here is what poetry does with grief that prose can't — how it compresses the experience until the image does the work the argument refuses to do. Yannis Ritsos anchors it.
Pip: The poem is called "The Dead House," and Ritsos doesn't soften it: "Soon the marbles sweated out blood again. The cleaners left too. They deserted us; so, we forgot about everything too: sweeping, mopping, dusting and the marble kept on sweating out more and more blood."
Mara: What that gets the reader is abandonment rendered as a physical law — the house bleeds no matter who tries to clean it, and eventually everyone stops trying, including the people who live there.
Pip: Antony Fostieris in his selected poems makes the same point through pure geometry — the circular trap where every beginning joins the end. Tasos Livaditis, the Griffin longlisted volume, closes on "music in the beyond / that seeks what poetry silences on earth." And Troglodytes frames the young poet standing against bigotry, recording grace — which is its own kind of elegy for what keeps getting buried.
Mara: Grief and witness, across every form the site carries.
Pip: What stays with me is how much of this — the poetry, the fiction, the elegies — is about things that refuse to be cleaned up. Blood in the marble. A dog that won't eat. A monk who can't make the Church listen.
Mara: Persistence against forgetting. That's the thread. More of it next time.
‘So there you have it, Michael. A rather sad or maybe a tragic story. I’ve had lovers myself, but nothing serious. And I’ve always insisted on Durex. I was caught once before and I was determined not to get caught again. I thought I was safe with you. I wanted sex with a man without a condom for a change. You don’t mind me saying that, do you?’ She smiled. ‘You let me down, but I forgive you. It wasn’t your fault. I’m actually enjoying being pregnant again.’ She squeezed his hand and reclined again in the armchair. ‘You’ve had a baby then?’ ‘When I was sixteen. Much too young to be a mother. So I gave it up for adoption.’ ‘So no children with Robert.’ ‘No, and none likely. The father of my first baby was an eighteen-year-old boy. He’s a fisherman in Lisnaglass now. Married and has four sons.’ Connie looked at Michael again. ‘Poor Michael. I think you would have liked to have had four sons yourself.’ ‘I’d have been happy with one,’ Michael said, then paused in silent reflection of the fickle trickery of nature. He took his first drink, then, returning Connie’s look, he asked, ‘What will Robert say or do when he finds out you’re pregnant?’ ‘Probably nothing. I am nothing to Robert now. The sad thing is that I love him. I truly love him.’ Her voice faltered, and she let her head fall back on the chair again, her eyes closed. ‘But I think it’s only a matter of time before there’s talk of divorce.’ ‘Did Frank and Kathleen have any children?’ ‘A son. Five years old now. Little Bobbie. Robert is very fond of him. Spoils him really.’ ‘Will you tell Robert that I am the father of your baby?’ The question secretly thrilled Michael. He was going to be a father. He was not a sterile mule after all. He was a whole man. Able to father children. And Nora. The chances were that Nora really was his daughter. Not Padraig’s. Praise be to God, he thought. What a happy, happy day. He drank with a greater feeling of elation than he had ever experienced. He felt like getting drunk, but his glass was empty and he wasn’t bold enough to ask for a refill. ‘No, I won’t tell Robert that you are the father of my baby,’ Connie was saying. ‘No need to. He thinks you’re sterile, remember. There’s a man I see in Belfast. Robert will think the baby is his, and I won’t tell him otherwise. Least said, soonest mended, Michael. Don’t worry. He won’t be challenging…
…moment to gaze at the peaceful faces. Susie’s light brown hair lay entangled, partly over the pillow and partly over her freckled nose. Just like when she’s awake, a little wild even in sleep. Katie lay face up, her lips parted slightly as though a pleasant dream had made her smile. Darker hair than her sister’s framed the doll-like features in smooth waves that would probably be just as unruffled when she awakened in the morning. Tyne shook her head in wonder at this serene child of hers and, as she turned to leave, marvelled anew at the difference in these children who had been formed together in her body. At Bobby’s door she hesitated a moment, not wanting to intrude without knocking in case he was still awake. But when she heard his gentle snore, she looked in. He lay, as he always did, with arms over his head. From the light coming in from the hallway, she satisfied herself that he was covered and sound asleep, no doubt to remain that way until his alarm clock told him another school day had arrived. Down the hall, Tyne heard a radio playing softly – if the songs the Beatles belted out could be described that way. Now, now, Tyne, don’t be old fashioned. Old fashioned or not, she thought, as she quietly pushed open the door to Rachael’s room, I still prefer Sinatra and Como and Pat Boone, and oh yes, Elvis is pretty good, too. Tyne quietly crossed to the bed and looked down on her sleeping daughter. Rachael lay face up, her arms akimbo, her smooth cheeks smeared with traces of tears. Tyne sighed, her throat filling as she recalled another night almost ten years ago when Rachael lay just like this with tears drying on her face. The day that she and Morley had to tell Rachael and Bobby their mother would not be coming home from hospital had seared itself into Tyne’s memory forever. But what could be distressing the girl so much at this time in her life that she had cried herself to sleep? What had happened on Saturday night that had made Rachael so troubled and morose as she had been since then?
His voice was clear and stern. She knew that his argument was probably right, but the convenience of the ready-made food was hard to replace. They decided to follow the first vet’s advice: put their pet on a daily medication and pray for the best. They started Elvis on his daily regimen, just like himself being on a daily dose of pills since his heart attack almost twenty years earlier, when one of his coronaries was occluded. However, he was lucky it was only one coronary, and he’s still around to tell the story. The beautiful animal got used to his medication to the point that every time after lunch he would say “Elvis, time for your medication” The little dog stood ready to be picked up by mom, to be taken close to the kitchen counter close to dad who was holding the tube with the daily dose of medication in his fingers and when he touched the side of his pet’s mouth and said, “your mouth” Elvis half opened his mouth to take the little squirt of medication which was followed by his treat. Days went by, months, a year, and almost a second year. They realized that their decision not to put their pet on chemo was the best one. And their Elvis gave them many days of laughter, against all odds and the doctors’ prognostications. Until two weeks before the second anniversary of the prognosis, while petting him, he noticed the dog was tender on his right hind leg over the area of his surgery years ago. He mentioned it to his wife. Concern spread in her eyes. They promised to keep an eye on him. Two days went by. The situation worsened. They called the vet, who suggested that perhaps the cancer metastasized from his bladder to his bones, as it was statistically the case in most of these dogs. They searched online, and they froze when they realized cancer metastasizes to the animal’s pelvis 90 % of the time. His pelvis was his weak point. True enough, as the days passed, Elvis worsened. He couldn’t go up and down the stairs anymore. She carried him up and down and outside to pee, and to his plate to eat, until the last day when he didn’t touch his food and stayed on his blanket all day. They exchanged glances numerous times. It was time.
Caitlin lifted her hand and stroked the back of Michael’s head. “Please don’t cry, my love,” she said. “Please don’t cry.” Michael raised his head. “I’m sorry, Caitlin. I’m truly, deeply sorry.” Caitlin smiled. “You big baby. I’ve never seen you in such a state.” She kissed his cheek and snuggled into his arms. Michael kissed her hair, her forehead, her cheek. Then he tenderly kissed her swollen mouth. “Are you cold?” he asked. He saw the long rip in the front of her dress and felt guilty. “Yes,” Caitlin replied. “I’m so cold my blood has frozen.” Michel gallantly took off his woollen jersey and gave it to Caitlin. “Pull that on,” he said. She did. “Oh, that feels so much better. Thank you, Michael. Here, let me drape this shawl over your shoulders. It’ll help keep you warm. Or a bit warmer.” “Why did you do it?” “Do what?” “Run away up here.” “I don’t know. It seemed appropriate. I needed to think.” “Did you see him?” Caitlin looked at Michael with a puzzled expression. “Did I see who?” “Jesus. On the cross. Out there over the sea.” Caitlin lowered her head again and pressed herself more tightly against Michael’s body. She paused thoughtfully. Her face was perturbed. “No,” she said at last. “Not Jesus on the cross.” “Did you see anything?” Caitlin’s fingers twisted Michael’s woollen jersey. “Oh Michael. I fell asleep for a while. I was exhausted. I had the most awful dream.” Michael held her with both arms. “Do you want to tell me about it?” “I don’t know if I could describe it as it was.” Caitlin was quiet a while. Then in an agitated voice she said, “I saw the sea, Michael: a stormy sea, with big waves breaking and the spray flying, the way I love to watch it in its winter rage. And then it was calm, as calm as a mill-pond, and dark, almost black, and thick like tar, as it is in that picture in the church. And the sky was dark. And everything, everywhere, was as still as midnight. It’s the way the world will look when it’s ended and we’ve all gone. “Then I saw something on the water, floating towards me, even though there was no movement of waves, no wind to drive it.
