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From Läsning för
vandrare
('Reading for hikers', Schildts, 1974)
1
The people I was fond of have been
wiped
from my memory.
Do you remember a friend, perhaps?
Be glad,
then, you are still alive.
7
The one who has owned a room in
someone's
heart
is easily reconciled with the thought
of eventually
gaining a room in the earth's bosom.
8
Love is only a preparation.
11
During a long life
I lived for a few minutes.
12
Live with your hand open
to the nestlings.
16
There was no one like me.
17
Welcome, poets,
to the cemetery.
19
Don't. Be. Afraid. Of. The Dark.
There's. No. Thing. There.
22
I dreamt I wrestled
with a flower and lost.
28
If you've fallen off the rainbow
you were on the rainbow.
29
Only those who live are able to forgive.
39
Do people still die today?
49
As a poem human life was
comprehensible.
58
My most beautiful memory
when I cycled through a rainbow.
61
Is this business of disappearing
really
so serious?
62
No one is a human being
who hasn't mourned
the loss of another
human being.
63
Death would not amount to much,
but illness, suffering, torment
— those confederates of life.
77
Death is too simple to describe.
78
One can get tired of years
but never of sunrises.
95
The sunset's light
and long shadows
serve to fix your home place
forever in your eye.
99
Sometimes I wondered if flesh
might just be most dangerous
substance
in the world.
135
Does it still happen
that someone stops
in front of this stone?
136
You who know who I was,
tell someone.
151
You can be wasteful with love
for you can't take it with you.
And no one inherits it.
152
A minute of communion
between man and woman
is enough for a life, or two.
174
The sorrows
one gets rid of.
175
Sorrow is a mercy for the living.
176
Of all the things in life
sorrow was
the hardest to lose.
177
Who will now mourn for the people
I mourned
for?
178
Life's deepest task and meaning
is to keep something in order
outside oneself
like a summer cottage or a car.
179
Secrets are the only things
you can take with you.
195
There are more ghosts
among the living than among
the dead.
207
Eternity
is like when mother
baked rice pudding
on Sundays.
209
Weariness,
what do you know about weariness?
210
To disappear is not
to not exist.
What has existed exists.
As I said.
211
One has reason to be astonished
right to the last.
235
In the dream I ran
one summer dawn along the shore.
Then I stumbled and fell to the ground.
With my heart pierced through
by a sword
lily.
236
No one sleeps on my arm.
238
All that I had: my life and health,
my work,
my friends
is someone else's now; be glad
if it
is yours.
***
Summer poems
(published in Utförlig beskrivning av en bärplockares
väg. Dikter från femtio år, 'A thorough description
of a berry-picker's path. Poems from fifty years', Schildts,
2006)
Even
the Ice Age had its summers,
short
it is true
as
the Nordic summers are,
but
light, light.
One
saw the expanses of ice.
But
one did not despair.
That
is my consolation.
*
Hay
belongs to the summer,
fragrant
hay.
How
lovely
a
well-kept meadow smells!
And
a barn full of hay,
the
kind there were still in the country
until
a short time ago,
could
make people drunk.
The
days of free hay are gone.
People
don't make love among bales.
*
The
mist cups its hand
over
the meadow's bosom.
The
sun throws down its gaze.
A
curious moon rises
to
see what is happening,
is
going to happen, or has happened already.
The
meadow says that she is unfortunately
already
married. The mist's hand
stays
where it is.
*
We
flesh-eating plants
are
not so numerous here in the north.
I
am the only one on this moss,
says
the sundew.
It
gets quite lonely sometimes.
My
surroundings think I'm mysterious,
but
I don't care about that.
There
are plenty of little flies here,
and
creepy-crawlies.
One
doesn't have to go hungry.
But
occasionally I
envy
the grasses and the semi-grasses
that
stand so close together.
I,
I have no one
whom
I can rely on.
But
it's all right.
And
soon the summer
will
be over anyway.
*
It's
important for the wanderer
to
carry his mobile phone with him in the forest.
Many
things can happen
in
a summer forest.
There
are deep holes in the ground
into
which one's legs can slide
up
to the crotch.
Walker,
be afraid
for
the cervix of your thighbones.
If
it's windy
a
rotten tree may
fall
on you and injure you
for
life.
Perhaps
you don't know how fast
a
tree can fall?
Even
the sap-filled branch of a pine
can,
if it's torn loose,
give
you a nasty knock.
If
it's too late to call for help
you
can still be traced
thanks
to your mobile.
But
even more important is
that
someone can call you
if
you have the phone in your pocket.
Someone
you love.
Translated by David McDuff
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