Archive for Estonia

First Snow

November 3, 2009 at 12:26 pm · Filed under Estonia, God, car, poem, poetry, snow

The dogs and I venture into an alien landscape,
Lapland, Siberia, the Martian surface, new snow
like frozen ashes, like dead skin flaking from
the god of all things too cold and forbidding.

Those twenty centuries passed in the shtetls
on the Russian steppes, in the ghettos of Krakow,
Smolensk, L’vav, were nary enough time to
accustom my blood to the profound absence of light.

I crave sunshine, orange juice, olive groves, warm
sand and blue water, and the company of dark-
complected souls who collect the sun’s rays
and reflect them in warm and lively conversation.

On this third day of November, when my world
has turned from green to white, all color drained
like blood from a corpse, I feel like a car spinning
on an icy grade, or skidding toward the ditch.

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Songbird

July 29, 2009 at 6:02 pm · Filed under Estonia, Tallinn, flight, flute, flying, poem, poetry, skydiving, song, songbird

The girl who calls herself Swallow,
ensconced in deep red draped
from hips to floor, kneels
demurely like a Baltic mermaid,
red hair falling across her shoulder
to her right breast, a small pendant
hung on a thin gold chain
against her fair, translucent skin,
a serene smile that reminds you
of La Giaconda, the same lovely face,
creamy shoulders and hands

coupled in her lap like two birds
held gently in a red velvet nest,
eager to take flight. She is
a songbird on the south shore
of the Gulf of Finland, a singer
and flautist, student and teacher,
who walks the narrow cobbled streets
of Tallinn, between twisting stone walls
and medieval churches where she
hears on the fresh ocean breeze
faint echoes of the old melodies,

the tinkling of ice crystals in winter
and the rustling of small animals
through florissant fields in summer,
and she plays them in her mind
and with pursed lips and
restless fingers that form the notes
on imaginary flutes carved from
the hollow bones of birds.
There is great joy in joining
the chorus of voices
that take flight together

at the song festival like
a flock of wild birds,
and the flute in her hands
flutters like a swallow aloft
on a delicate current of song.
Swallow leaps into the sky,
spreads her wings wide
and glides above the green world
floating and banking and swooping
earthward like the swallow
she has become, and thinks
now I know why the birds sing.

hüpe

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

anni

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