Another poem by Nordbrandt, this time from 'Offshore Wind'

BEHIND THE DIKE

A little into March summer suddenly

seems all too close:

One evening evening just goes on.

The darkness can’t put out

the white houses in the lyme grass on the dike.

Past and future are each other’s hostages.

The ransom money glitters

in the offshore wind on the far horizon

where no one can come.

So my travels resist

and erase the languages

where I for a while was me.

In all the world I have finally

always stayed at home.

A poem by the Finnish writer Tua Forsström (who writes in Swedish)

Fish

Fish go to bed when darkness falls,

they cover themselves with sand and lie motionless

at night. Children close their eyes and suck

their thumbs behind rose-patterned curtains. But

flying fish hover on sleepless beneath the moon

six metres above the waves, eleven thousand metres

above the sediment and slime bed of the

Marianas Trench.

A carillon poem by the Swedish poet Tomas Tranströmer

Carillon

Madame despises her guests for wanting to stay at

        her seedy hotel.

I have a corner room on the first floor: an awful bed,

        a bulb hanging from the ceiling.

Oddly enough heavy hangings where a quarter of a million

        invisible mites are on the march.

Outside a pedestrian street goes past

with strolling tourists, fleet-footed schoolchildren, men

        dressed for work leading rattling bikes.

Those who think they make the world spin round and those who

        think they are helplessly spun round in the world’s grasp.

A street all of us take – where does it eventually lead us?

The only window in the room looks out over something else:

        The Wild Square,

a fermenting field, a huge trembling surface, sometimes full

        of people and sometimes deserted.

Everything I have within me materialises there – all my fears,

        all my hopes.

All the unthinkable that will even so occur.

I have low shores, if death rises eight inches or more

        I will be inundated.

I am Maximilian. The year is 1488. I am being held a prisoner

        here in Bruges

        because my enemies are at a loss –

        they are evil idealists and what they have done in the backyard

        of horrors I cannot describe, cannot transform blood

        into ink.

I am also the man in overalls pushing his rattling

        bike further down the street.

I am also the person who is visible, the tourist who walks and

        then stops, walks and then stops

letting his gaze wander over the pale moon-burnt faces and

        heaving material of the old paintings.

Nobody decides where I shall go, least of all myself,

        and yet each step is taken as it must be.

To walk around in the fossil wars where everyone’s invulnerable

        because everyone is dead!

The dusty masses of leaves, the walls with their

        openings, the garden paths where petrified tears

        crunch under heels...

Unexpectedly as if I had walked into a trip-wire the

        carillon starts up in the anonymous tower.

Carillon! The sack splits at its seams and

        the notes spill out across Flanders.

Carillon! The cooing iron, hymn and pop-song of the

        bells, all in one, and written quivering in the air.

With shaky hand the doctor wrote a prescription that no one can

        decipher though the handwriting is recognised...

Over roof and square, over grass and switch

Over living and dead their notes now roam.

Christ and Antichrist – which is which?

The bells will finally fly us home.

They have fallen silent.

I am back in my hotel room: the bed, the lamp,

        the hangings. Strange sounds can be heard here, the cellar

        is dragging itself up the stairs.

I lie on the bed, my arms outstretched.

I am an anchor that has dug down deep and

        that holds on

the huge shadow that is floating up there

the great unknown that I am a part of and that is certainly

        more important than I am.

Outside the pedestrian street goes past, the street where my

        footsteps die away as does what’s written, my preface to

        silence, my inverted, heretical hymn.

Poem by the Danish writer Klaus Rifbjerg

In Bellman’s time

Carl Michael Bellman

often felt quite atrocious

in the morning.

Carl Michael Bellman wanted

so much to have a quick drink

but knew it just wasn’t on.

Carl Michael Bellman’s mornings

were prosaic,

then he wrote poetry.

With seething stomach and liver

like a stone

Carl Michael Bellman sat

in his cold room and would have

given almost anything

for a glass of hock

or to see a tankard full of ale

but he stood his ground.

Carl Michael Bellman’s fingers

were sore and it hurt

to play the lute.

He played and looked out over

the chimney-topped roofs and the wet snow.

He said to himself:

Give up now, Carl Michael Bellman

throw your pen down now

and give up,

sell your lute now and mull

a glass of red wine with cloves

the devil take the lot of it.

He felt quite atrocious in the morning did

Carl Michael Bellman

To hell with you, Ulla & Movitz

it said inside his head

though on the paper different music came

(Your health, comrades, your health, dear sisters!)

and in the evening things were a bit better.

Poem by the Dutch writer Albert Hagenaars, from his three-language collection 'Palawija'

III: ANCESTOR

Behind glass I see you then,

as a copy in hardened synthetic resin

of the skull fragments compressed to stone:

Meganthropus Paleojavanicus.

Gone for good are the hair-covered skin,

the flat breasts with their long nipples

and the short hoarse sounds of the tongue

in which you warned, made love, died,

but not the strings of notional DNA

still spiralling in the woman with whom hand

in hand I stand before the dark showcase

and reconstruct your heavy features.

Your luxuriant world with predecessors

of elephant, buffalo and crocodile

is imperceptibly slowly buried

beneath layer upon layer of sediment.

After hundreds of thousands of years of waiting

you lift up your once so strong hands

of what is now caked grit.

reach out towards me

and want my mouth to breathe

life into her. I incorporate you

when our descendants survive

according to a theory far from proven yet.

For more information, go to here

Poem by the Dutch poet Ida Gerhardt

I. THE DECEASED

Here rests, her mouth now full of earth,

she who it was once bore me;

she who forever since my birth

has sought but to destroy me.

And now her body must decay

In me she has returned to stay.

– And her I cannot slay. –

II. SECOND VOICE

You are of her: regard the stone:

The very names both of you own.

Accept your part. – I gaze on you.

Till she in peace will sleep anew.

Till you in peace will stand here too.

For other translations of poems by Gerhardt, go to here and here

New poem for his latest collection by the Swedish writer Lars Gustafsson

All iron longs to become rust,

said the old metallurgist

It wants to unite with the air

sink down to the bed of lakes

Become red earth. Not only iron

longs for its disintegration.

Utopias subside powerlessly

and become rhetoric. Even

proud monotheism rusts

away and becomes pleasantly

teeming amoral

polytheism. Sharp blades

gleaming swords and heavy axes

never last eternally.

All iron strives to become rust.

Said the old metallurgist.