standing up

In a split second of hard thought, I managed to catch her. 

 I stopped, holding the hen in my hands.  Strange,

 she didn't really feel living: rigid, dry, 

and old white plume-ridden lady's hat that shrieked out the truths of 1912.  

Thunder in the air.  An odor rose from the fence-boards,

 as when you open a photo album that has got so old

 that no one can identify the people any longer.

I carried her back inside the chicken netting and let her go. 

 All of a sudden she came back to life, she knew who she was,

 and ran off according to the rules.  Hen-yards are thick with taboos. 

 But the earth all around is full of affection and tenacity.  

A low stone wall half-overgrown with leaves.  

When dusk begins to fall the stones are faintly luminous 

with the hundred-year-old warmth from the hands that built it.

It's been a hard winter, but summer is here and the fields want us to walk upright. 

 Every man unimpeded, but careful, as when you stand up in a small boat. 

 I remember a day in Africa: on the banks of the Chari, there were many boats, 

an atmosphere positively friendly, the men almost blue-black in color 

with three parallel scars on each cheek (meaning the Sara tribe). 

 I am welcomed on a boat - it's a canoe hollowed from a dark tree.  

The canoe is incredibly wobbly, even when you sit on your heels.  A balancing act.

  If you have the heart on the left side you have to lean a bit to the right, 

nothing in the pockets, no big arm movements, please, all rhetoric has to be left behind.  

Precisely: rhetoric is impossible here. 

 The canoe glides out over the water.

~ Tomas Transtromer

from The Half-Finished Heaven

translation by Robert Bly

Photo by Will Baxter/CRS