Scandinavian poetry, part ten.

photo by the noisy plume

The wind
by Stein Mehren


Wind before daybreak, you are not wind, you do not
  blow, you are a wind before the wind, listening
across the earth…in breaths of light, gusting,
  gleaming in ice. As a crown of starry leaves
you blow out the heavens above this land drunk with night,
  brightening. You break from seals of the dew,
spheres within spheres, the earth beaming: Light
  over sheening spans of water, mirroring
there where birdsongs run like chinks of light, you draw
  the skies behind you, a seven-colored robe 
of forest wakening within a rushing wind of five seas.
   Wind like a wind before the wind, gusted out of the light
 into the circulation of waters, the open trembling of the high leaves.
  As the earth itself, heaven by heaven, 
rises from the sea. Like a birth. An embrace.
  Like death. Like wind. Everything that trembles in wind.