Translated by the author
from Huomisen vieras (“Tomorrow’s Guest”)
ed. Poesia, 2019
the charged stone darns the forgotten edge of the sky
with its pearly flagellum, dimmed by its silence
black blue
the expansion was localized
in the room of transformations
a pedestrian arrives at the scene
and picks up the heavenly block,
crystallized into an ornament, and says
I can see you have powers
but I must inscribe something on you
We live in chronic tension. We await a defining
moment, but it never seems to arrive. Darkness thickens
even though it is the very thing we have been hoping
to depart from. Tension usually takes some kind of shape.
We are utterly fed up with the fantasy of solutions, damnation,
and so incapable of changing the course. Fog runs down the
windows, but how to change the currents of the heart? Three whistles
are the cue to get up on the deck. Someone has talked
about a sense of responsibility, an ability to act
without guarantees. Someone also said the secret root or
the Mediterranean Sea cannot be spoken of.
Anna Tomi is a poet, translator, and a literary scholar, who at the moment divides her time between Uppsala, Helsinki, and San Francisco. Her debut collection Huominen vieras was published in 2019 (Poesia). She is currently finishing her dissertation at the University of California, Berkeley on Finland’s and Sweden’s modernism with a focus on intertextuality. You can follow her work on Instagram (@mannatomi) and her website (annatomi.com).
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