Translation: José Luis Rico
Heräämisen valkea myrsky
(The White Storm of Awakening)
ed. Poesia (2013)
I let the white storm of awakening roll over me.
The forehead’s intermittently overflowing sundial
is stripped clean of shadows
and my ruins undress.
The bed’s cupola is still half-full of dreams.
I let the curtain’s open courtyard roll over me.
Suddenly the building’s awash with what I am.
Summer morning,
wide windows stand free in the grass.
In the hallway, like a quilt, I open the feathers of a joyful cry,
I embrace the habits of spacious rooms.
Around me there is a square that gathers
light like water, I sit on the grass,
the building doesn’t shade me over.
The cupola of sight is still half-full of sleep.
A fruit tree unveils its nuptials, I intended
to press my face against the tangled, grumbling light of day,
against the eyelid’s bonfire dance,
and you howled in the tunnel of the solar apex.
The windowpanes smudge our faces with eyeblinks.
We controlled each other.
You, with the prophet’s child-eyes. I, with the youth
that tasted brazen in the mouth, as if it wrestled,
as if by wrestling it gleaned angels from the thicket
and I wrestle you, from the bush to the river
where the water threshed over you.
Something spun and rippled in the cracks of your morning mutters.
The morning opens the staircases of breath.
A vital, unstained wonder tingles
as if you stumbled, in a somber forest,
against the birch that stares in all directions.
From underneath the branches, I retrieve the overwintered chair
relinquished with reluctance by the grass,
as if someone was still sitting on its empty seat.
An invisible shine conquers gardens and roads,
you can feel it on your skin
and joy erupts from you, like fingers
of a fist that blinks awake.
Erkka Filander (b. 1993) is a poet and the Poesiavihkot publication series editor-in-chief. He has published three works of poetry. Filander has focused especially on printed texts, on how the reader and the work meet in the materiality of paper.
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