TIME WILL COME

Written by Katerina Gogou

Translated from the Greek by Manolis (Emmanuel Aligizakis)

Narrated by Kristine Doll

Greece

Time will come when things will change

remember this, Maria

you remember that game during the school recess

when we run holding the baton

—don’t look at me — don’t cry. You are the hope

listen, time will come               

when children will select their parents

they won’t be born at random

there won’t be any closed doors

with stooping people outside

and we shall choose our work

we won’t be horses they look at our teeth

people —  think of it —  will talk in colors

others in musical notes

just save in a big jar with water

words and concepts such as

unadjusted, oppression, loneliness, price, gain, humiliation

for the history lesson

times are tough — I don’t want to lie — Maria

and more tough days will come

I don’t know — don’t expect too much from me —

this is what I’ve lived, this I’ve learned, this I’ve said

and from all I read I keep just one:

it only matters to remain a human being

despite all this, Maria,

we’ll change life.

 

 

Katerina Gogou, was born in Athens on June 1, 1940 ,and died  October 3, 1993. She was a poetess, author, and actress. Before her suicide by pill overdose at the age of 53, Gogou appeared in over thirty Greek films.  Her book Three Clicks Left was translated into English in by Jack Hirschman and published by Night Horn Books in San Francisco. The Greek version of the same book was first published by Kastantiotis in 1978. Her poetry was known for its rebellious and communist content. As an actress, Gogou was known for lesser roles of rebellious, free spirited women. She won the first women’s award at the Salonica film festival. As a poet, she’s known for her antiestablishment poems and her anarchist ideals. Her poetry is filled with indignation and protest; however, her ideals and her wounded psychological state lead her to suicide at the age of 53.

Manolis (Emmanuel Aligizakis) is a Cretan-Canadian poet and author. He’s the most prolific writer-poet of the Greek diaspora with over 70 books published in more than a dozen different countries and in eleven different languages. He was recently appointed an honorary instructor and fellow of the International Arts Academy, and awarded a Master’s for the Arts in Literature. Born in the village of Kolibari on the island of Crete in 1947, he moved with his family at a young age to Thessaloniki and then to Athens, where he received his Bachelor of Arts in Political Sciences from the Panteion University of Athens. He served in the armed forces for two years and emigrated to Vancouver in 1973, where he worked as an iron worker, train laborer, taxi driver, and stock broker, and studied English Literature at Simon Fraser University. He has written three novels and numerous collections of poetry. His articles, poems and short stories in Greek and English have appeared in various magazines and newspapers in Canada, United States, Hungary, Slovakia, Romania, Australia, Jordan, Serbia and Greece. His poetry has been translated in Romanian, Swedish, German, Hungarian, Ukrainian, French, Portuguese, Arabic, Turkish, Serbian, Russian, Italian, Chinese, Japanese, languages and has been published in book form or in magazines in various countries. He lives in White Rock, where he spends his time writing, gardening, traveling, and heading Libros Libertad, an unorthodox and independent publishing company which he founded in 2006 with the mission of publishing literary books. His book of translations entitled George Seferis-Collected Poems was shortlisted for the Greek National Literary Awards, the highest literary recognition in Greece. In September 2017 he was awarded the First Poetry Prize of the Mihai Eminescu International Poetry Festival in Craiova, Romania.