Lennart Sjögren: 'Världsgrävlingen'

 

The world-badger

 

Tumultuous:

the head of the badger and of the human.

To observe and allow to pass one’s eye

the beings of joy and those of sorrow

and all that exists in between to be scared of.

 

The subsidence in the building continues

starting in the lower regions

continuing in the upper.

I see the snouts, I see the eyes

I sense smells

of sweat, sex, animal products

I find the smells pleasant 

and burrow deeper in.

 

The badger appeals to me

in its clumsy floundering after bird’s eggs.

The short-lived life of flies

appeals to me

and the glass that prevents their delight

from erupting.

 

I light my lamp

look around the walls

if these walls really are the walls of a crypt

a cathedral or an underground sett

just for the badger.

And opposite on the far side is a store

or a workshop where new functional beings

are tried out.

The world which inside the corset

bears its large belly

where everything possible and what is basically sick

seems able to be developed.

 

In jars of formalin

one can see at the institutions the mistakes of biology –

which are no more mistakes that we are.

Those easily affected turn away

and find the world hard to love.

 

The chains that run along the walls

the strange lights

the sloping windows

and the sniffing heard in the passages lower down.

 

Is it the world-badger

which now

before our deathbed wake has got new young

and new bird’s nests that the sow licks in

with her tongue?

In that case it is 

running still further

and is it the gruntings we can hear

or the more poetical wind from the inner sea,

is it the Eiffel Tower that is finally collapsing

or something else among the tall constructions.

 

Then it smiles at us

the badger

when it now seeks our throat

equally good

as any of the world-spurning pious.

To see the poem in the original language, go to here.