“Walking Down a Street in Stockholm” and other poems

by Juris Kronbergs

Translated from the Latvian by Māra Rozīte

Walking Down a Street in Stockholm

Walking down a street in Stockholm
Walking down a street in Riga

Walking down a street that’s not mine

Mouths that mouth in different tongues
none are mine
none are yours
A star shines a crown glows
Nothing’s mine

All my life down the same street
It’s nothing

Nothing. I get used to it
This nothing. It’s mine

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Time on Gotland

She sat on a bench on the outskirts of Slite
She was blind and 90. She had sailed to Estonia when
She was young.
I said: — My parents came to Gotland in the beginning
of ’45 as refugees, in a fishing boat from Liepaja.
— Liepaja?
— Yes, it’s an important harbour town in Latvia, it was
once called Libau.
— Oh, yes, Libau. I know all about Libau. Don’t they call
it Libau anymore?
— No, Libau was the German name.
— I remember them well, the Baltic place names that I
learned at school: Dorpat, Libau, Reval. Reval is now
called Tallinn, I think.
And Königsberg, what’s that one now?
— Kaliningrad.
— Really. But of course Riga is still Riga, isn’t it?

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Nocturnal Documents
Haiku

summer nights
dark as winter days
I too become so

the deep silence of night
a light caress of restlessness
the silence thins out

the lake at night
is a black meadow filled
with buds of insomnia

nights are the back
of the mirror of day
where we look for ourselves

is that a fruit in the tree
or a lost fledgling
night will not tell

at night the dream
reruns as little as maybe
a show for the asking

morning closes in
clocks chime three —
the soul’s night-watch

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Photo cover by Julia Dragan