Tomas Tranströmer: "Six winters"

[Image source: https://www.google.com/amp/s/vallterrier.com/2009/12/30/istapp-of-the-day/amp/ ]





Six winters     (Sex vintrar)




1

In the black hotel a child sleeps.
And outside: the winter night
where the big-eyed dice are rolling.


2

An elite of the dead fixed in stone
in Katarina churchyard
where the wind shakes in its armour from Svalbard.


3

One winter during the war while I lay sick
a giant icicle grew outside the window.
Neighbour and harpoon, memory without explanation.


4

Ice hangs down from the edge of the roof.
Icicles: the upside-down Gothic.
Abstract herd, udders of glass.


5

In a siding an empty railway carriage.
Still. Heraldic.
With the journeys in its claws.


6

Tonight snow haze, moonshine. The moonshine jellyfish itself
trembles before us. Our smiles
on the way home.  Enchanted avenue.

The second poem in Tomas Tranströmer's 1989 collection For living and dead (För levande och döda).  Here was the first one.

Katarina Church (Kyrka) in Central Stockholm [Image source: Wikipedia]. Since Tranströmer's poem the church has had to be rebuilt due to fire damage. New to the elite dead is Anna Lindh, the Minister of Foreign Affairs who was assassinated in 2003. Also here is the much-loved troubadour Cornelis Vreeswijk, who died in 1987, and going a little further back, Sten Sture the Elder (died 1503),  regent of Sweden and still a potent name forty years later, as recounted in Strindberg's Gustav Vasa.

[Image source: https://www.svt.se/nyheter/lokalt/stockholm/naturfenomen-i-stockholms-skargard-lockar-dykare ]


Large influx of jellyfish in the Stockholm archipelago, October 2019.