With my recent homecoming to this city after a year away in Greenland a suite of poems emerged that engages with the clashing landscapes of ice and bog, the contrasts of frozen volcanic peaks and the damp green flatlands. Across these flowing landscapes a rupture opens, unseamed, from which new and inner forms spill outwards in English, in Danish, in Greenlandic and Inuit. Memories of older layers, intergenerationally bent around the insights of a moment, ring out in scalding pain, or in a flash of humour, registering metaphors from the plant and animal realms, from personal history to political inheritance, via ancient snails and the rhizome matt of dune grasses.
In these poems I wanted to ask how we might shape and speak of a future that sustains beauty and life and how, through a new realisation of grief and love, we can persist through the volatile changes we are deeply involved in – both in the microcosm of our own immediate concerns and in the vaster skies of Earth changes, ecosystem collapse and the sharp perils of the Anthropocene.
Here I hope to offer a flavour of the emerging body of a larger work. ‘Volur’ and ‘White Fire’ become an expression of the feminine land ethic which I strive to wrestle into form. Both contain that tension between human the Other that pulls on the imagination through time and space.
In the spirit of wise poetic asymmetry ‘Sailor’ emerges exactly the other way round –a breech birth arriving psychologically feet-first. First the human and specific, the relational and memory-soaked, then a gradual broadening out to meet the greater world of creatures and other forms.
Together they are a short set of reflections on my return to Denmark, post-Arctic melodies, minor key lament-lullabies for all that has been lost to time and modernity. By turns tender and bittersweet.
In the final analysis, the poems are all love songs. Love songs to the anguished soul, love letters to the impossibly beautiful, stubbornly persisting world, bringing utterance to its own edge where all that can be said, all that is necessary, is to find breath to whisper: ‘I love, I love, I love’
white fire
niece has grown
she waddles ahead stretching out arms for balance, talks a gibberish language with two words in recognisable danish:
no and more
puts her face really really close to mine and frowns, cocking her head.
i believe she’s pondering what is wrong with me
– but she likes to sit on my arm and share all her food with me
perhaps she sees my hunger
my brother took us for a weekend trip to commune de fanø, waden sea
– the wide shallow surf shines as mercury messages, white fire.
i believe he has missed me and tries to treat me with a wild danish landscape:
drifting sand, dunes & lyme grass. such delicate light catchers
i love, i love, i love
before, the inuits would weave it, the icelanders eat it.
all the way to nunavut it grows
stretching out our complicated family rhizome
harvesting and processing methods were like those of other traditional seeds:
to be beaten and beaten and beaten as the soul’s approach to come into one’s own
freeing the sweetness inside by mimicking nature
i love, i love, i love
the fox’s route must be through this backyard
i see it every day – if it can keep its wildness in this place
i should be able to:
exchange the arctic silence for european interstate proximity
the man from a previous online dating reached out to me:
when are you back home?
several times
the danish word is hjem, the inuit inigisaq
he says he’s landed on his feet
after his divorce now – i asked him
what he’s reading these days
the news he replied
common grasses:
grow along the interstate
sees covering all moist, wet or liquids surfaces
seed fill the air, you find them:
in your food, clothes & bed
annelgræs (puccinellia)
bunke (deschampsia)
enghavre (helictotrichon)
hjertegræs (briza)
havre (avena)
hejre (bromus)
rævehale (alopecurus)
sødgræs (glyceria)
will embellish
with their zealous
shapes of life:
ripening on tender
stems among a mix of species
bowing down in thick breezes
of heavy air. you:
eat them,
wear them,
sleep with them
vǫlur
ah yes, this land. a swollen wound turned away towards shade, in early mornings:
sliding molluscs shine with moist
water evaporates from the earth rising up the subsoil. all growth gives off steam
the underworld brews fog, licking up your bones. slowing your thoughts
–i love, i love, i love
strange bog birds talk & talk at you, no longer recalling their language you cover your head, making hands lace:
still, they circle, flocks of accusations & disappointments there are too many to make out, your satyr blinks amused: how’s losing one’s way not delicious?
satyrs (old norse sutr), figuring in the völuspá, are spoken
into presence by the völva (old norse vǫlur)
sutr ferr sunnan með sviga lævo: skinn af sverði sól valvita
–that ‘stone speaks clash’, ‘warriors tread the path of hell’
heavens will break apart, be consumed in flames
yet a new world rises from water, fertile and teeming with life
i believe she is right, all is of water
whereas volva (womb in latin) is a genus of sea snails
cowry allies or ovulids marine molluscs in the family
ovulidae, vulva shaped. all is from water
nights are lavishly audible:
the wood nymphs sing your blood draws at dreams
bleeds stories of victories that will follow defeats
sailor
she asked me about the abuse twenty years ago
by now or more. i said beating & kicked in the head
as i went down concussion, internal bleeding in eyes
then she went on to say that i likely have had
brain injury, permanently
somehow satisfaction shone through her concern, even brought slight colour to her cheeks
i didn’t tell her i read a pandemic article on the hidden trauma of female lives damaged by violence, understudied: no data on cognitive
difficulties or other physical explanation for slowing down or failing completely
whereas substantial research is done on men, in professions where they typically sustain injuries
i didn’t tell her how my heart is breaking in new ways
for women in lockdown of male rage the repetition, flaring up
the stickiness of pain
– what smoulders
recalling their happy voices while falling asleep on sofas as they discussed & planned
kvindekamp er klassekamp
(women’s struggle is class struggle)
i believed them. i believed they stayed up late changing the world no idea why or into what
it was already playful & pleasure
–mothers make magic
took me days before i revisited our conversation
she pissed me off, asking me out for coffee & delve
my frayed youth, uninvited:
blemished the bright sweet sunshine
pollen floating in air
urban bumblebees’ blessing
almost repealing
the cityscape in me.
that semenish fragrance
from the flowering linden trees
she’s letting me pay, though
she’s the one pouting really:
does not grow old
or irrelevant gracefully
so, she comes down on my weakest points
–these days she gropes back far in time
where her love for my dead mother
lives
she should have told her:
all love wants to be told.
realised this bedroom is a
ship’s cabin
how could i not see this before?
the aqisseq1 amulet is up on the wall, so is amma syncletica2 my favourite redstocking
on the nightstand is chubby ganesha
(i have guilt about that figurine friend: plastic without having to be) & the niece’s gift:
a wooden puzzle piece flamingo
dancing, dancing
FOOTNOTES TO ‘SAILOR’
1. Aqisseq is the Greenlandic name for an Arctic ptarmigan. believed to hold protective powers
2. Amma Syncletica was a fourth century Christian saint and Desert Mother from Roman Egypt
Dark Mountain: Issue 21
Our Spring 2022 issue is an anthology of non-fiction, fiction, poetry and artwork that revolves around the theme of confluence
Read more
