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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I love this poem. I also love the commentary Victoria wrote to accompany it, “way back” on March 6, 2012:
“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.”
A poem always speaks for itself, I feel, but here’s what else I can tell you about Victoria Broome:
“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 am pretty sure I recall this poem from my first reading of it — way back! Lovely lovely. It’s worth re-posting. Yes indeed.
It’s stuck with me, too, Michelle: always a good sign.