These poems were written in and around the small hamlet of Virtsu, Estonia and inspired by the interviews with its inhabitants. This is a place where nobody comes to. A place that is bleeding people and dying the slow death of every village in every corner of the earth.
A place that is nothing special. A place in limbo. A place that used to be.
*
1939
Your people
are holding their empty bellies in pain
putting up preserves fermenting
beer in iron anchors
faces like mirrored electricity roaming
all tribal and exotic over
water
white dots explode in the night
Russian soldiers are drilling holes into
boulders young and beautiful
filling them with gunpowder
making way for a seaplane harbor
you didn’t even know that islands could bleed
that the receding mist
going into the shoreline
holds this
*
The Bar
The townsmen are watching
the eagle circling her birthday
again
swooping at the jackal lying dead
in the roots of a juniper
here everyone pretends
that remembrance is survival
they never learn new melodies instead
shelve the old carefully between the gaps
of their teeth and every single time they speak
you catch glimpses of fish factories
heavy dew resting on nets
wind hauling you through the smoky dark
Pests Rein offers his opinion
and pushes a thin glass over the counter
Alien species the rest of the drunks agree
and fifteen bleak smiles shine like lighthouses
Later
when the jackal has moldered
rust runs red along thin lips
as they restock the roots of the juniper
and sing the eagle to sleep
ghosts of once powerful machines
reset the sky for tomorrows rehearsal
*
The Dismantled Railroad on The Old Bridge
Old photographs show my father
among wasps and snakes
smiling like lovers gently
against the rocks reading the pages of waves
his age is stuck like a knife in the back
and the bridge behind him
silk
hung as a line five hundred meters over water
the fish calmly under
taking their own kind of journey
when the dark trains stop singing
old men drag their bodies out of the sea
trace the line against moonlight
and start licking the shine off
*
Sixty-six
She’s washing his black socks
holding them over the water peeling
herself open like ash of paper falling
adrift again and again until-
*
Circle
The bride chased bees with an empty jar
at dawn the wet eyelids spilled out
and the boy stared at stars all through the night
they cut each other’s hair after and held hands
drew circles into the dust on the floorboards
grew old in dark songs
they live in a dream now
and drink cool water together at dusk
Mart-Matteus Kampus is an Estonian-born writer previously published in the Aberystwyth University MA Anthology, NoiseMedium magazine and Estonian literary magazines. More recently Mart collaborated with Alina Senchenko for a show that opened in the Open Space gallery in Vancouver, Canada and wrote for the NO99 Theater play ‘The Red Balloon.’
Image: Saaremaa 2017, Kārlis Dambrāns, Creative Commons.
