life and death tanka
death creeps in our veins
from the day when we are born
struggle and fighting
life is just an ilusion
life is made of shuttered dreams.
white bishop
White Bishop – Emeric Imre
“now I am emptier than ever
since I feel more and more rich of you
and the sun and the moon stay on my temples
now I am the worst and the best
and look, there is nobody to help us
the world barely holds her own weight
and in a white wall of mute muses
the black bishops look for a path
and I love you with pitty and horror
all that is yours belongs to me
like a white bishop that captures
the black queen for eternity
I miss you and I look for your face
in every corner of existance
if I take the sand in my han
I feel a ring playing the game of bride and groom
I hear you in battles from time to time
the soldiers of your guards honour you
my beloved with very great problems
with slavic face and queen name
and I love you with pitty and horror
all that is yours belongs to me
like a white bishop that captures
the black queen for eternity”
From The Heaven Of My Heart
Songwriters: Pekka Kainulainen, Santeri Kyoesti Kallio
“I who have forged the heavens
I also have my king
To northland I was sent
I was cast to distant Pohjola
Enforced by my king’s spells
His orders undenied
From the small crumbs of earth
From the fleece of summer eve
From the memory of a single seed
From the flair of a swan’s feather
I let the milk come seeping
From the heaven, the heaven of my heart
There my skills were known to them all
They all knew my name
All knew of my might
And I forged a godly device
A machine divine
The gates of plenty opened by me
From the small crumbs of earth
From the fleece of summer eve
From the memory of a single seed
From the flair of a swan’s feather
I let the milk come seeping
From the heaven, the heaven of my heart.”
Death Alone
There are lone cemeteries,
tombs full of soundless bones,
the heart threading a tunnel,
a dark, dark tunnel :
like a wreck we die to the very core,
as if drowning at the heart
or collapsing inwards from skin to soul.
There are corpses,
clammy slabs for feet,
there is death in the bones,
like a pure sound,
a bark without its dog,
out of certain bells, certain tombs
swelling in this humidity like lament or rain.
I see, when alone at times,
coffins under sail
setting out with the pale dead, women in their dead braids,
bakers as white as angels,
thoughtful girls married to notaries,
coffins ascending the vertical river of the dead,
the wine-dark river to its source,
with their sails swollen with the sound of death,
filled with the silent noise of death.
Death is drawn to sound
like a slipper without a foot, a suit without its wearer,
comes to knock with a ring, stoneless and fingerless,
comes to shout without a mouth, a tongue, without a throat.
Nevertheless its footsteps sound
and its clothes echo, hushed like a tree.
I do not know, I am ignorant, I hardly see
but it seems to me that its song has the colour of wet violets,
violets well used to the earth,
since the face of death is green,
and the gaze of death green
with the etched moisture of a violet’s leaf
and its grave colour of exasperated winter.
But death goes about the earth also, riding a broom
lapping the ground in search of the dead –
death is in the broom,
it is the tongue of death looking for the dead,
the needle of death looking for the thread.
Death lies in our beds :
in the lazy mattresses, the black blankets,
lives a full stretch and then suddenly blows,
blows sound unknown filling out the sheets
and there are beds sailing into a harbour
where death is waiting, dressed as an admiral.
Pablo Neruda
In the wave-strike over unquiet stones
In the wave-strike over unquiet stones
the brightness bursts and bears the rose
and the ring of water contracts to a cluster
to one drop of azure brine that falls.
O magnolia radiance breaking in spume,
magnetic voyager whose death flowers
and returns, eternal, to being and nothingness:
shattered brine, dazzling leap of the ocean.
Merged, you and I, my love, seal the silence
while the sea destroys its continual forms,
collapses its turrets of wildness and whiteness,
because in the weft of those unseen garments
of headlong water, and perpetual sand,
we bear the sole, relentless tenderness.
memyselfandela 