A poem by the Norwegian writer Thor Sørheim

THE SOAPSTONE QUARRY

After a thousand-year sleep willow-scrub

and bushes parted, and I was staring straight at

traces of hammer and chisel, furrows in the rock,

where our forefathers had hewn out

items for cooking vessels and stone for buildings

that would be graced with ornaments. There where the path

meets the sheer rockface under Piggåsen

a Viking society once climbed up ladders

and hung on ropes over the steep slope to extract

the new age from the soft rock. At the foot

of the soapstone quarry rose their daybreak dreams

of sales and exports for every pot

that was hewn out base first, history

was at stake and maybe the pots were

thread on sticks by their handles and carried

between two sleek shoulders over the moraine ridge

down to the boats in Glomma. When a thousand years later

I try to conjure up a picture, leaning against the quarried surface,

of the man tilting free the mouth-edge of the pot

from the mountain, I discover that the projection I am stroking

is an item that was never taken out, and the hollows

with water and the soapy crust that hardens gives me

no other answer than that one day our era too

will, with all our dreams and exploits, end up in some

far corner of the universe, like every creation myth,

beautiful, fully interpreted and unfinished.