Zoila Forss
Unpublished poems
Translations: Anne Ketola
Noughts and crosses
You, father,
who are everywhere but stand nowhere,
I tie your gaze
to this three by three board.
Three of paper by three of ink.
Let’s play forgiveness.
Today there’s no escape.
The aurora is a boomerang
that ran away from us yesterday,
and arrives to my fist
when the bet with the sun has been won.
May the edge of this journal be the grid.
May the nine boxes receive
the hoops of your willfulness
and the crosses of my loneliness.
We play forgiveness,
the one that weighs in my pocket,
the one that annoys in your shoe.
Two dimensions with a taste of old paper
won’t define the end of the game.
.Be the surviving wheat ear
under the effervescent rain.
I will be the flower of verbena
in the revenge of the sun.
I tell you,
oblivion’s magma
cannot melt us.
Father,
the house sings being free without being it
and I plow its chest
to make room to a seed
not yet named.
Three by three board,
a circle for a cross.
Smoke rings escape from your mouth
and the windmill of my index catches them.
Ink and paper
without truce or excuse.
Perhaps it’s the same
Linked by love,
bound by hate.
Sailor of mine,
you strand or rise up.
Perhaps it’s the same.
Caramelized blindness,
delicious deafness.
Asthmatic life blows,
Unknown death scorches.
Perhaps it’s the same.
Tied to be untied,
dead of love in the same grave.
With no headstone, but with memory.
Born on all fours or hustled out.
Perhaps it’s the same.
I’ve swiped off the shore from you,
and out of envy
I steal all the hidden sand from your feet.
And out of apathy
I let your torso go cold.
Perhaps it’s the same.
We are an interrupted concert.
Sitar and violin, guitar and cajon,
isolated by the contempt,
united by the excuse.
Perhaps it’s the same.
We are an interrupted agenda
under an unknown regiment.
It was my turn to be the absent ocean,
it was your turn to be the lost sailor.
Perhaps is the same.
I am a sea dying of love in your shut mouth.
And its white soldiers invade me,
they stain my roar,
they discolor your moan.
Perhaps it’s the same.
Onion’s brine,
your cascade of knifes
has opened my eyes,
and has fenced yours with wire.
Perhaps it’s the same.
Sivuvalo Platform 