A late, lovely poem by Lars Gustafsson

Ramnäs railway community seen from the north

Nobody knows what year it is

Perhaps it is a year that has never existed

The road through the railway community

from north to south comprises the following:

Uno Hedlund’s Cycle Repairs

where you can also borrow the phone

The post office with the unhappy lady who

naturally does not cautiously steam open

the station master’s love letters

and read them with mild melancholy eyes

The district medical officer reserved and mulling

over the enigmas of the medieval plagues

in his white palace up there on the hill

The Coop where the yellow buses turn

and where you can even buy kerosene

important for philosophical studies

That is why Fichte and Hegel still

have a faint smell of lamp-kerosene about them

The railway station with Clark Gable as a guard

(‘in this job, let me tell you,

you stand – all the time – with one leg in prison)

And the wonderful telegraph of brass:

Trains out

The chemist’s burned down later

the lady there was surly. To turn up there

needing something was an insult

she never forgave. Actually.

After which a bridge over Kilbäcken

a bridge that didn’t mean much

Salholm’s Grocery, the private alternative,

where the ham in the cupboard was always green

and the cheeses sweated like the peat-diggers

who dug on the bog out to the east

In Grocer Salholm’s dense, luxuriant beard

there was always, while he served

the actually rather rare customers,

a lit cigarillo with the brand-name Tärnan

And yet he never caught fire

Here ends Ramnäs railway community

We’ll tell you about the Church Village some other time.