In the Quiet After Slaughter

excerpt

Crossing The Line
At the Peace Arch border crossing south of Vancouver, Old Glory
snapping in the breeze off Semiahmoo Bay, Reggie Cameron
eases the Chevy Impala behind a busload of Vegas-bound retirees.
– Remember, he coaches, a glance in the rearview mirror. When
they ask if we’re planning to bring anything back, the answer is . . .
Larry Cameron leans forward and hollers into his father’s unsuspecting
ear, No, sir!
From the front passenger seat, Mrs. Cameron, consoling Larry’s
carsick younger sister Lenore, says, One of these days, Lawrence . . .
Larry mimes terror, stifling his hysteria with a beach towel.
Lenore groans, I feel like I’m going to . . .
– Okay, Mr. Cameron stiffens. Everybody smile.
A U.S. Customs official pokes his head into the Impala’s open
window.
– Morning, he drawls. Where we all going today?
He circles the car, boot heels clicking on the pavement.
– Everybody a Canadian citizen?
– We’ve got the neighbour’s boy with us, Mrs. Cameron confesses.
I’ve got a letter signed by his father if you wanna see it.
The official steps away from the car. My reflection appears in his
mirrored sunglasses. I feel like I’ve done something seriously wrong.
– Plan on doing any shopping?
Larry and I roar simultaneously: No, sir!
The officer slaps the car’s vinyl roof. You folks have a nice trip!
We stop for soft drinks and snacks at the first supermarket. The
Camerons convert the price of each purchase into Canadian currency.
Back on the road, horse ranches and trailer parks flit by in a
blur. Mrs. Cameron circulates a bag of potato fritters.

https://draft2digital.com/book/3562874

https://www.amazon.com/dp/0980897971

Yannis Ritsos – Poems, Volume I

Ocean’s March

Where did the young girls’ orchestra go?
to the seashore garden where
at night the sailors drank
amid the trees
and pounded their feet in the air
for a gold coin of moon
in her hair behind the basil plants?
In the nights
only an enormous green reflection of the sea
roams on deserted steep rocks
We pass silently by
the dark rooms
opposite foggy mirrors
that don’t recognize us anymore
and we listen to the footsteps of silence
of the wind and of the sea
on our sleepy touch
It is something of the void’s safety –
a locked door at night
the sketch of a procession of cypresses
in the silver obscurity
of autumn starlight
And when the solitary full moon
rains resignation and forgetfulness
we open the window
and pray
God we thank you
that we are thus alone and sorrowful
so we may look at the sky without any awe
serene and endless like the firmament
forgotten and unrecognizable like the unknown

https://draft2digital.com/book/3562834

https://www.amazon.com/dp/1926763076

Prairie Roots

excerpt

In the Nest
IN THE NEST The early years of my generation were difficult for all families
on the prairie, but we, as youngsters, did not notice the
poverty. Being born and cradled in the ’30s was not our problem
and our immigrant parents were used to hardships. After all,
most newcomers were equally poor and there was no television to
encourage comparisons. In that respect how easy my parents had
it! Apart from that nothing else came easy for them, and here my
story begins.
Like so many immigrants from Eastern Europe, abject poverty
and political repression of one form or another compelled the
lucky ones to take a boat to Canada. In father’s case he hailed
from a small country village called Opariwka in the southeast sector
of Poland, where children of Ukrainian ancestry were not permitted
to attend school beyond the sixth grade. Mother hailed
from Sokal, a small city north of Lviv, also under Polish rule at
the time.
Having served as a conscript in the Austro-Hungarian army on
the eastern front and having assessed the futility of any kind of
meaningful future, father borrowed whatever money he needed
to supplement his partially sponsored passage and bid his ancestral
land a wrenching farewell. Sponsored for their labor, he and
two brothers came individually to work on farms near the village
of Glenavon, which they always referred to as Glenawoun. Meeting
mother, and marrying in 1931, they rented a quarter section
farm six miles east of Glenavon and proceeded to eke out an existence,
and produce a family. In those years nothing else grew, as
the droughts and the grasshoppers decimated the land.

https://draft2digital.com/book/3562900

https://www.amazon.com/dp/0980897920

The Incidentals

Blacksmith
His left foot on the pedal up and
down rhythmically pressing
to open and close the bellows
pushing air through the fiery
kiln burning red, luminescent,
indescribably beautiful coal and
bathing in their fire a spade he
grabbed with tongs held by powerful
hands of a sweaty blacksmith, who
on the frosty December day worked
the rusty metal until pulling it out
of the kiln and placed it on the anvil
he started striking it number of
times, old Dimitris, the village
blacksmith morphed the amorphous
the art he learned from his dad
the older blacksmith tied by
his ankle to the anvil unable to
just walk away, unable to reach
further than the length of his chain
like a donkey tied to a metal fork
pushed into the hardened soil.
He too was a good son to a father,
good mannered son, quiet student
regular to his classes, his catechism
school where he learned how to
live peacefully, he too was a young
boy who, one afternoon at the back of
the altar, suffered at the hands of
the young beardless deacon
that grey day when everything changed
and old Dimitris, the blacksmith
has kept the guilt in his heart,
amorphous unshaped concept,
like the steel burning in his kiln
which after he put on the anvil
and pounded it with such mania
as if it was the violating penis of
that beardless young deacon.

https://www.amazon.com/dp/1926763637

Μαρία Κάλλας

Μαρία Κάλλας (βαπτισμένη Μαρία Άννα Καικιλία Σοφία Καλογεροπούλου, γεννημένη Sophie Cecelia Kalos, 2 Δεκεμβρίου 1923, Νέα Υόρκη – 16 Σεπτεμβρίου 1977, Παρίσι)