The Wind by Stein Mehren

The Wind by Stein Mehren

From Fire & Ice: Nine Poets From Scandinavia and the
North, edited by Gordon Walmsley (SalmonPoetry 2004)

The Wind

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

 Stein Mehren