Three Swedish Poets

by Robin Fulton Macpherson

Gunnar Ekelöf
insisted, tell me please have you seen
the desert bloom? “Yes, it was the face
of the blind man feeling with his hand
what his mouth remembered.”

Werner Aspenström
looked in the dark forest within us
for the northern soul. It was “only
a wavering sunspot between trees
where the slanting light lands.”

And Lennart Sjögren
wondered what the stones wanted of him
that evening. “All they might want of me
is to return like them to the waves
which once tossed us both here.”