Evening’s coming. The land and the forest meet
the big cool silence that is disturbed
only by the buzz of gnats and the warning cry of a nightingale
from the bushes near our sauna. I come back from the garden
through chill alternating with warmth: it reminds me
of summers in childhood when I cycled
through similar waves of cold and warmth,
through the smell of pine trees and strawberries. Childhood.
No, I’d never like to get it back.
There was a shadow lying on my childhood. I have always
fled this shadow, am fleeing it even now,
although I feel that when I’m finally out of its reach
there will be only a void, a cool voiceless void
with pine bark peelings, feathers and ourselves
caught in a dizzying vortex, a free fall
from night to morning, from morning to night.
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