Selected Poems by Jaan Kaplinski

Author:Jaan Kaplinski [Kaplinski, Jaan]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: Russian & Former Soviet Union, Fiction, Poetry, Classics, Poems
ISBN: 9781780371436
Google: rFDCbwAACAAJ
Amazon: 1852248890
Publisher: Bloodaxe
Published: 2011-01-26T00:00:00+00:00

*

A bird in the air. It is not its wings that bear its wings. Its wings are borne by the air. Words stand on wordlessness, logic on the absence of logic.

But sometimes we are, after all, closer to what exists. Before there is something that is like a blanket on top of one who sleeps. The body is unknown, but the blanket has its own folds, bumps and hollows.

We know someone is there beneath the blanket, but that ‘someone’ and that ‘knowing’ and that ‘we’ are even more under wraps than what is under the blanket. We are the blanket, not the sleeper.

We do not know whether he is alive or dead, although from time to time it looks as if he is breathing. And a blanket cannot breathe.

So it is not all the same, after all; all is not a game. But playing is allowed under the blanket, too – hide-and-seek, and make-believe that you are a badger in its sett or a fox in its lair.

I try to speak of this. Always. To think. Sleeping and waking. But my voice resounds as though from deep underwater, and nothing reaches the surface but bubbles.

Truth itself is also a bubble, which you build laboriously there beneath the waters surface, like a water spider, which builds itself a nest and drags air into it, bubble by bubble.

The nest looks like a little silver ball, like a globule of quicksilver, at once so heavy and so agile.

Truth is a bubble, part of the Truth which saves us from suffocating. Truth is that which breathes, and allows others to breathe.

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