The opening poem of Lennart Sjögren's 'I grenverket'

The icicle

I am the icicle

and resemble a god in the sense

that a thousand years to me are as a day

and a day to me a thousand years

I gleam in a way nothing else can gleam

I carry on where roofs and what protects end

am pointed downwards

into a different time and in different way of reckoning

am turned upwards

like a dagger I rip with my tip

through the cosmos

I am a live skin of crystalline glass

my insides shake

when I crash down and gain my greatest triumph

then I resemble humans and I know

that the border between life and death

is a random notion

I belong to the elements

I transform myself, I crash down in spring

transform myself again, become meltwater

transform myself again, become autumn rain

I transform myself again to ice

when travelling through the realm of the cold

In crashing I turn into myriads of stars

then I do not count seconds or millennia

I am the sovereign

in falling I break into two, three pieces or more

and when completely crushed against the ground

I arise in the splintering no one has time to count

in a raised foam of silver, iron, copper

in an outward-hurling movement

I then rise up like a small upturned waterfall

Just as you are the one you are

I am the one I am

I was born in the collision between cold and heat

but in actual fact I was not born at all

I have always been and always shall be

I belong to the cyclical

I show myself and cause amazement

children especially show their delight

I succumb, disappear and become

a moment of chagrin in those who believed

I would always continue to exist for their sake

Look at me one more time

when I rise up in the splintering

when I become a star-fall and disappear

return again.