Tuesday Poem: “Finland ” by Victoria Broome
Finland
She returned to Finland with her children
wrapped tight against the ice of the night.
So blue their throats ached.
It was a return to the old times, familiar pain,
the first crack of a river in thaw, black haunting
of spindly trees, skeletal white morning sky.
Air so sharp it sliced their hearts with grief.
Her family never sent the gold they had promised,
her husband bought book after book
that would not feed them.
Her children became jewelled possessions
lining her soul with love like the map of Finland.
One night he biked home to an empty house,
all doors open, books piled neatly in each room.
He finds a library has no sound and dreams himself lost
in the shell pink canals to his children’s hearts.
His love will become a foreign language.
She settles them into the long winter,
dark fatherless months waxing over them,
stitching bright cloth, sharing words by the fire,
she coaches her children in their mother tongue.
(c) Victoria Broome
Reproduced here with permission.
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About the Poem:
On December 6 last year I first mentioned the “Poet’s Corner”, an email series I ran where I invited poets to feature a work and also “speak” to it—so the reader got to hear the poet’s voice twice: through the poem itself and through the “Poet’s Note” on their own work.
Victoria Broome’s ‘Finland’ is another poem from the Poet’s Corner series and one I found powerful and evocative from first reading, but I think the truest evocation of the poem is simply to share Victoria’s own words:
The Poet’s Note:
“I first wrote this poem about 25 years ago and it was from a strong memory I had of a customer who used to come into a bookshop I worked at. She was from somewhere in Scandinavia and I picked Finland. She was married to a man who rode a bike everywhere and she came into the shop to pick up all the books he ordered; they had young children and she rarely spoke. I remember her as looking resigned most of the time and one day another customer told us that she had left and taken the children with her, back to where she had come from. Literally her husband had come home to an empty house.
I have worked on the poem over the years and this is its final incarnation. It is one of my favourites, I think, because it is the first poem I managed to write that stepped outside my own personal experience and told a bigger story; and also was perhaps the first poem that gave me a sense of really being a writer. A lot of people respond strongly to it and interestingly an acquaintance who is from Finland felt it was so authentic that I must have been there.”
You can also read Victoria’s poem “The Foreign Office” here.
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About the Poet:
Christchurch poet, Victoria Broome, has been writing poetry “for as long as she can remember”. She won the CNZ Louis Johnson bursary in 2005 and has had poems published in anthologies and a variety of New Zealand literary magazines and most recently in Flap – The Chook Book 2, which is the second anthology from a group of women writers called the Poetry Chooks. Victoria was an inaugural student at the Hagley Writers Institute and completed a two year course, 2008-09. The manuscript completed over these two years, Big Red Engine, was runner up for the prestigious Kathleen Grattan Award in 2010.
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I really like this poem. The sense of the cold is particularly wonderful throughout it. Thank you Helen and Victoria.
I really like it, too, Emma. And The Foreign Office as well. Given it’s runner up status in the Kathleen Gratatn have my fingers crossed that a publisher will see the merits of BIG RED ENGINE very soon.
I remember this poem from your postings. The cold in it eats into my bones but I love the way the woman warms the children with colour and coaching by the fire in contrast to her husband’s house, the doors all open.
Thankyou both.
There is a great deal of subtlety in the poem, including the use of contrasting images: it’s very well done.
There are so many rich images to glide me through this tale. The heartbreak and loneliness are delicately told here. These lines in particular speak to me:
He finds a library has no sound and dreams himself lost
in the shell pink canals to his children’s hearts.
His love will become a foreign language.
Thanks for sharing this haunting and beautiful poem, and the author commentary. How interesting that it was taken from a real experience, and how this story/scene has stayed with the poet for all these years.
Yes, there’s a power in it that will endure, I feel. It’s quite haunting and evocative, with plenty of power there but the whole nonetheless delicately drawn.
Haunting and harrrowing – very rich in imagery and story. Thank you Helen for introducing me to Victoria’s work.
Keith, I’m glad you liked the poem; I like its touch of magic realism as well—something in the feeling of the imagery, I believe.
I had to stop by and read this poem. I just finished your book today and saw on Goodreads this poem with the word Finland in it (as I come from Finland) 🙂
And I liked the book btw 😀
Excellent on all fronts! 😉
I love poems that tell a story and this one does it beautifully. I especially love the line:
“dark fatherless months waxing over them”
There are some wonderful lines in this poem–and they build on each other to create an even more powerful ‘whole.’