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UNDER PRESSURE
Tomas Tranströmer
Powerful engines from the blue sky.
We live on a construction site where everything shivers,
where the ocean depths can suddenly open.
A hum in seashells and telephones.
You can see beauty if you look quickly to the side.
The heavy grain fields run together in one yellow river.
The restless shadows in my head want to go out there.
They want to crawl in the grain and turn into something gold.
Night finally. At midnight I go to bed.
The dinghy sets out from the ship.
On the water you are alone.
The dark hull of society keeps on going.
Tomas Tranströmer, 1931–2015
Tranströmer’s poems had been translated into thirty-eight languages in 2001. “Tomas Tranströmer’s pens are a luminous example of the ability of good poetry in one culture to travel to another culture and arrive.”
Source: The Half-Finished Heaven: The best poems of Tomas Tranströmer, chosen and translated by Robert Bly. Minneapolis: Graywolf Press, 2001. Quote, p. xv. Poem, p. 29.
Doodles made by Laura at thatgrrl.ca.