Last week, I featured “On Writing”, from a post written in 2012.

The immediately preceding post was Victoria Broome’s poem, Finland, which I featured as a Tuesday Poem on 6 March 2012.

On re-reading, I thought all over again what a wonderful poem it is, so am sharing it with you again today.
.

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.

Finland

—

To read Victoria’s commentary and a bio (current as of 2012), click on:

Tuesday Poem: “Finland” by Victoria Broome

Victoria’s first collection, How We Talk To Each Other, was published in 2019 by Cold Hub Press.