CONTENTS

  1. Title Page
  2. Acknowledgements
  3.  
  4. FROM THE SAME SEA IN US ALL (1985)
  5. Sails come sailing out
  6. Our shadows are very long
  7. Only to go along
  8. You, you moon
  9. White clover asks nothing
  10. Who has who has ever
  11. O distant sun
  12. If you want to go
  13. Every dying man
  14. They are standing up to their knees in blood and mud
  15. Everything is inside out, everything is different
  16. Sleep covers us too much for one, too little for two
  17. Non-being pervades everything and being is full of peace
  18. No one can put me back together again
  19. And when the sea retreats from here
  20. Night comes and extinguishes the numbers
  21. Once more spring pulls young leaves from buds
  22. Light / reminds us
  23. Oven / alone
  24. What woke us
  25. Night and earth
  26. To be / Icarus
  27. Honeybees
  28. You / light-footed moss
  29. Near / nearest
  30. The same / sea
  31. Big black hedgehog
  32. A flying fish
  33. Ant trail
  34. Summer’s / last evening
  35. So light / after all
  36. Heart / of rain
  37. Ashes / of one world
  38. Painting / a boat
  39. The late well-master
  40. With a broken wing
  41. Everything melts
  42. A tit / upside down
  43. Ink not yet / dried
  44. Wiping away / dust
  45. Swarms of daws
  46. All in one
  47. The white vase
  48. Little by little / our dirty river
  49. Little by little / a poem fades
  50. An understanding
  51. I am both / spider and fly
  52. Dana paramita
  53. There is nothing / between us
  54. To wake / in the dead of night
  55.  
  56. FROM THE WANDERING BORDER (1987)
  57. The East-West border is always wandering
  58. The washing never gets done
  59. We started home, my son and I
  60. My little daughter
  61. To write more
  62. On the other side of the window
  63. There is no Good
  64. Four-and-a-half tons of Silesian coal
  65. Once while carrying coal ash
  66. People were coming from the market
  67. Sometimes I see so clearly the openness of things
  68. It gets cold in the evening
  69. A piebald cat
  70. The early autumn, a faded aquarelle
  71. The crop is reaped
  72. Poetry is verdant
  73. Silence of night
  74. We always live our childhood again
  75. Dialectics is a dialogue
  76. Destruktivität is das Ergebnis ungelebten Lebens
  77. Elder trees that thrushes have sown
  78. Once I got a postcard from the Fiji Islands
  79. Potatoes are dug, ash trees yellow
  80.  
  81. FROM THROUGH THE FOREST (1991/1996)
  82. There is so little that remains
  83. To eat a pie and to have it
  84. Lines do not perhaps exist
  85. As the night begins, a forked birch captures
  86. I begin to wash my son’s shirt
  87. Think back to the vanished day
  88. Once, at a meeting, I was asked
  89. Death does not come from outside
  90. The wind does not blow
  91. You step into the morning
  92. The ticking of the clock fills the room
  93. A flock of jackdaws on the outskirts of the town
  94. I do not write, do not make poetry
  95. I never weary of looking at leafless trees
  96. The most disconsolate of landscapes
  97. Silence. Dust
  98. The Forest Floor
  99. Dust. I Myself
  100. To fight for the rights and freedoms of the body
  101. This autumn’s great big yellow chrysanthemum
  102. Birch tops like brushes
  103. The beginning of the year is like a white sheet of paper
  104. Politics and politicians are gradually becoming streamlined
  105. I ended up in literature
  106. I came from the town
  107. Autumn comes closer
  108. I come up from the cellar
  109. A bird in the air
  110. In the room, a moth flies from east to west
  111. In the ventilation grating lives a tit
  112.  
  113. FROM EVENING BRINGS EVERYTHING BACK (1984/2004)
  114. The snow’s melting
  115. Through the cellar ceiling
  116. White paper and time
  117. For many years, always in March
  118. It’s easy to say what’s become of the snow
  119. I was coming from Tähtvere
  120. Once again I think about what I’ve read
  121. I don’t feel at home in this synthetic world
  122. Spring has indeed come
  123. The morning began with sunshine
  124. I could say: I got out of the bus
  125. Running for milk I saw wood sorrel in bloom
  126. I write a poem every day
  127. We walked the road to Kvissental
  128. My aunt knew them well
  129. The sky’s overcast
  130. Silence is always here and everywhere
  131. The other life begins in the evening
  132. I don’t want to write courtly poetry any more
  133. Only at dusk do eyes really begin to see
  134. A last cloud moves across the sky
  135. The rain stops
  136. There are so many insects this summer
  137. There are as many worlds as grains of sand
  138. It makes little sense to talk about the subconscious
  139. There is no God
  140. The world doesn’t consist of matter or spirit
  141. Late summer: a faded old watercolour
  142. The full moon south-east above Piigaste forest
  143. I told the students about the beginning of Greek culture
  144. From stalks and curls of pine-bark
  145.  
  146. FROM SUMMERS AND SPRINGS (1995/2004)
  147. In the morning I was presented to President Mitterand
  148. The radio’s talking about the Tiananmen bloodbath
  149. The sea doesn’t want to make waves
  150. God has left us
  151. The possibility of rain
  152. A fit body doesn’t exist
  153. The age-old dream of mankind
  154. One day you will do everything for the last time
  155. Evening’s coming
  156. It’s raining again
  157. The centre of the world is here
  158. My poems often aren’t poems
  159. Less and less space for flying
  160. More and more empty words
  161. I saw something white far away
  162. The weather changed overnight
  163. My eyesight’s weakening
  164. The world is a single event
  165. I opened the Russian-Chinese dictionary
  166. I’ve thought that I thought about death
  167. I don’t have a land or a sky of my own
  168.  
  169. THE SOUL RETURNING (1973-75)
  170. The Soul Returning
  171.  
  172. POEMS WRITTEN IN ENGLISH
  173. I remember it well
  174. Fatherland / homeland
  175. I feel sorry for you white paper
  176. A lullaby that never ends
  177. After many bitterly cold days
  178. God is smile
  179. Something stirring
  180. Karl Barth, Paul Tillich, Karl Rahner
  181. Coming home
  182. Om svabhavasuddhah sarva dharmah
  183. Wild geese flying overhead
  184.  
  185. About the Author
  186. Copyright