Winter's Gaze
I lean like a ladder and with my face
reach in to the second floor of the cherry tree.
I'm inside the bell of colors, it chimes with sunlight.
I polish off the swarthy red berries faster than four magpies.
A sudden chill, from a great distance, meets me.
The moment blackens
and remains like an axe-cut in a tree trunk.
Fron now on it's late. We make off half running
out of sight, down, down into the ancient sewage system.
The tunnels. We wander around for months
half in service and half in light.
Brief devotions when some hatchway opens above us
and a weak light falls.
We look up: the starry sky through the grating.
from
The Great enigma: new collected poems
Tomas Transtromer, trans by Robin Fulton
New Directions, 2006
839.71 T772g
Tomas Gösta Tranströmer (born 15 April 1931) is a Swedish writer, poet and translator, whose poetry has been translated into over 60 languages. Tranströmer is acclaimed as one of the most important Scandinavian writers since the Second World War. Critics have praised Tranströmer’s poems for their accessibility, even in translation; his poems capture the long Swedish winters, the rhythm of the seasons and the palpable, atmospheric beauty of nature. Tranströmer's work is also characterized by a sense of mystery and wonder underlying the routine of everyday life, a quality which often gives his poems a religious dimension. Indeed, he has been described as a Christian poet. He was awarded the 2011 Nobel Prize in Literature. -wiki