Kim Simonsen
Four poems translated from the Faroese by Randi Ward
This side of the new millennium,
a hail shower shrouded the world.
Everyday life is easier
to lose sight of
now years and weeks are a vaporous flight
of stairs you ascend backwards,
one step at a time,
until you’ve forgotten
both beginning and end
then fall down
into the ground
where the snow can fall on you, too.
We walk along the seashore
in this millennium,
we search the horizon.
Beneath the moon,
we step from stone to stone.
The cold wind
drives you farther
and farther still.
Stones overgrown
with green seaweed
make you stumble,
again and again,
over the mystery
behind stones and moons.
Now that we know recently discovered bacteria
live off the iron
along the bottoms of the pools
that surround the cores of nuclear reactors,
everything is going to surge through us
while the third millennium draws spindles
between cells that have yet to be born
and the will to live.
In this millennium,
each day costs the same.
For every ray of winter sunlight
through the dirty window,
another grain of sand disappears.
It’s written in the weather forecast these next three days,
low pressure and hazy.
It’s in the frost flowers on the window,
in the moonlight reflected in a bucket of water,
in the restless sleep and dreams
disturbed by raindrops
gently tapping at the window.