Today's translation is of a poem by the Danish writer Pia Tafdrup

MY MOTHER’S HAND

Immerse myself in a drop’s still light

and recollect how I came into being:

A pencil put into my hand,

my mother’s cool hand round mine, which was hot.

- And then we wrote

in and out of coral reefs,

an underwater alphabet of curves and points,

of snail spirals, of starfish arms,

of flailing octopus tentacles,

of cave vaults and cliff formations.

Letters that quivered and found their way

dizzily across the whiteness.

Words like flatfish that flapped

and burrowed into the sand

or sea anemones with hundreds of strands

gently swaying in unison.

Sentences like streams of fish

that gained fins and began to rise,

gained wings and moved with a steady rhythm,

throbbing like my blood, which blindly

threw stars against the heart’s night sky,

when I saw that her hand had let go of mine,

that I long since had written myself free of her grasp.