…These men are worth your tears:
You are not worth their merriment.

-Wilfred Owen, “Apologia Pro Poemate Meo”

When that loudmouth on the wireless machine
Alludes to Western Civilization
What does he mean? Paradise Lost? Probably not
Nor Saint Paul speaking on the Field of Mars

The Kalevala, Hagia Sophia
With its pendentives lifting up our prayers
Horatius fighting to defend his bridge
And Wilfred Owen dying bravely on his

Lord Tennyson and Idylls of the King
Chapultepec, Henry V, Becket
The paratroops at Arnhem, Saint Thomas More,
His King’s loyal servant, but God’s first

The Stray Dog poets of Saint Petersburg
The brave last stand of Roland at Roncesvalles
Lewis and Tolkien and glasses of beer
Montcalm and Wolfe on the Plains of Abraham

Hildegard von Bingen, Siegfried and the Rhine
Magna Carta, HMS Hood, the Thames
The Grove of Daphne, “The Old Rugged Cross”
Beatrix Potter and her little pet rabbit

El Cid, Anne Frank, John Keats, Saint Benedict
“I Have a Dream,” Dostoyevsky, and Greene
Viktor Frankl, Dag Hammarkskjold, and Proust
Good Chaucer’s naughty pilgrims telling tales

The Gettysburg Address, Willie and Joe
Stern Saint Augustine of North Africa
Wodehouse writing a jolly bit of fun
Saint Corbinian and Bavaria

The ancient glories of Byzantium
Pius XII contra the bombs and lies
The 602nd TD Battalion
Saint Joan, the Prado, and Robert Frost

And far, far more.

When that loudmouth on the wireless machine
Alludes to Western Civilization
What does he mean?

Cuando era niña, mi mamá told me to speak in spanish cuando I couldn't say mis "r"s en inglés.  Garlic made my mouth stink from the broth I drank when sick, so I ate spicy things to soothe my throat.  Muchas veces comímos tamales por la Navidad.  Cuando era niña, creí que era mexicana, pero soy blanca.  Y tengo miedo de hablar español en frente de los nativos y no sé como mostrarlos mi habilidad real.  En el fín, soy una wera, y más que eso, soy francés, y más que eso, soy alemán, and more than that, I'm finnish.

I tried to take pride in my heritage and learn this obscure language.  I tried to find similarities in appearance and personality.  I boasted of this culture that I so wanted to love and be a part of.  I thought I'd found my viking roots but no one around me cared.  I learned "tourist finnish" and forgot it because I couldn't practice.  I read the Kalevala and laughed at old newspaper articles about the joke of "St. Uhro's Day."  I pointed out weird translations in songs due to too many syllables, but in the end, I was too many generations away from being truly finnish.

Why are there so many poems about love?  Maybe it's because when we're in love we stop searching for somewhere to belong because we've found someone to belong to.  I've found my person but not my people.  I've been to seven schools and cried each time I left because I lost those I had tried to make into my extended family.  I try to fit in with so many groups because I feel like I never fit in with just one and in the end I'm on the outskirts.  We have so few people come to holidays and none of them really ever talk with me.  I have a mother but she's an island in a sea of lost chances and forgotten ties.  We seek love to have a claim to something but I've had to learn that I can lose that, too.  I strive for heritage to make up for family dysfunction.  In the end I am white, or rather, white-washed.  I was born without ethnic belonging and have not belonged ever since.

The cold told a tale to me
the rain suggested poems
                                     another tale the winds brought
                                     the sea’s billows drove;
                                     the birds added words
                                     the treetops phrases

                        -The Kalevala, I, “In the Beginning” 1

We’re born to light and water and earth and air
Yet most of my life I cared little for verse,
But somehow words have become wonderful,
Even beloved because poetry -

- Poetry takes the chaos (or apparent chaos?)
Of life, and gently sings it into meaning
Through line, stanza, meter, and metaphor,
Shapes it, loves it, and makes it beautiful.

Poetry is like baptism, perhaps,
Or painting, sculpting, drawing, making music,
Or digging and setting a post-hole just right,
Helping set one’s perceptions of reality just right

And it is beautiful




1 The Kalevala. Elias Lonnrot. Trans. Keith Bosley. An Oxford World’s Classics Paperback.  OUP. New York. 1989.

I saw a portrait of Uri Zvi Greenberg,
it showed an older man
perhaps twice my age,
with no recognizable poetic traits in his face,
perhaps had they shown a young man
it would've been different?

I saw a portrait of Miklos Radnoti
he died as a young man,
with no recognizable poetic traits in his face,
and I have nearly lived his full life,
perhaps if they had shown a child
it would've been different?

I saw a portrait of Anne Frank
whom all the world knows.
I am twice her age,
it's not different
it's worse
peace comes regardless of age
it begins for the living
at the expense of the dead.

I saw a portrait from when I was a child,
like the opening lines of
the epic poem I am becoming,
I will not be a national treasure
like the Kalevala
or Shahnameh
I will be immortalized
like all the unnamed citizens
of Uruk
remembered merely because they lived there,
whose names are unknown
like those
who did not leave a diary,
or a notebook of poems,
and like sheep to the slaughter
did not live to my time to read them.

And, so
he marries the Finn and

Väinämöinen
walks in

dragging the whole Kalevala
behind him on a sled

opening the word box
for the sounds to escape

and leave
to dwell inside him

the myths and lore
of Love.

A cloudberry
falling into her

pregnant
belly button

the child
fashioned from her

living in the quick quick
midnight tales

the frozen hoard of words
thawing

as my hearing
takes them in

the unborn
listening to its future

in its past.

Words upon lips
dissolving into laughter

like a falling snowflake
on the tip of a pink tongue

stuck out in
the Aurora Borealis.

Tollite vobiscum verba, et convertimini ad Dominum

-Osee 14:3 1

Provide yourself with words, with magic words,
And like Old Väinämöinen 2 sing them
Into the air, the wild, clean air, those words
Sing all that’s Good and Beautiful and True

The Sampo 2 of your mind spins not out flour
Nor salt nor gold, but needful thoughts and songs
In words that sing and sail beyond the sun
And back into that Founding whence they came

Write, then, the Good, the Beautiful, the True
And let God write them back again to you



1 Osee / Hosea
2 The Kalevala

A Secret University

You registered for university
When in the womb you were beloved of God
Your classes then began when you were born
When you awoke, and saw your mother’s eyes

And in them all the possibilities
Of life, of golden life, given to you
Upon this planet with its flowered fields
Forests and rivers beneath its moon and sun

And all these tell you, in eternal Song1
That all the world is your university


1In The Kalevala, in Lewis’ Narnia, and in many faiths, God sings the world into being.