Tomas Tranströmer: Song

The white flock swelled: the swarms of gulls cried out,
Dressed in the ragged sailcloth of dead ships
But speckled from the smokes of outlawed coasts.

Alarm! Alarm! There’s something overboard!
They crowded tight to form a signal flag
That fluttering read Look sharp! There’s booty here

And the gulls steered across the water-widths,
Across blue pastures in the waves white foam
A streak of phosphor gone straightway to the sun.

But in his ancient journeys Vainamoinen
Sparkles on sea-swells in the ancient light,
The horses’ hooves so swift they’re hardly net.

And back of him: the green forest of his songs,
The oak tree poised to leap a thousand years,
A great mill turned by the singing of the birds.

And every tree imprisoned in its own roar,
With immense pinecones glimmering in moonlight,
When the sentinel pine was lit up like a lighthouse.

It’s then the Other rises with his galdar;
The arrow springs wide from the bon, sees
With song in its feathers like a flight of birds.

A dead second when the horse abruptly stiffens,
And breaks up over the blue-grey waterline
Like storm-clouds under thunder’s quick antennae.

And Vainamoinen heales into the sea
(A fireman’s net the compass points stretch out).
Alarm! Alarm! The gulls swarming where he fell.

So too the man who stands without anxiety
Bewitched at the center of his fortune’s wheel
With his eleven grain-sheaves gold and bowing.

The alpine peak of Trust humming in the ether,
Three thousand meters up where the clouds are holding
A regatta. Sleek and well-fed the shark wallows

All silent laughter dowm here, under the sea’s surface
(Death and rebirth trading places in the breaking wave),
And the wind cycles peacefully through the leaves.

Then drums, then, on the horizon muffled thunder,
(A buffalo herd racing from a prairie fire)
The shadow of a fist tightens in a tree

And the man at the center of his fortune’s wheel,
Bewitched there, is thrown down. And the heavens
Glow behind a wild boar’s mask of evening sky.

His twin, his Doppelgänger, has grown jealous
And makes a secret pact now with his woman
And the shadow gathers itself, becomes a wave.

A wave in flood, dark, gulls riding aslant
The foam and the port-heart hissing in the crest.
Death and rebirth trade places in the breaking wave

The white flock swelled the swarm of gulls cry out
Dressed in the ragged sailcloth of dead ships
But speckled with the smoke of outlawed coasts.

The gray gull is a velvet-backed harpoon.
Up close, it looks like a snow-covered hull
With a pulse keeping time to a hidden beat.

His flyer’s nerves in balance. He lifts and wafts.
He dreams, footloose, hanging in a heavy wind,
His hunter’s dream, his certain marksman’s beak.

Greed blossoming, he falls gently to the surf
And wriggles around his prey like a gray sock
Twitching. Then lifts again, all sky, all spirit.

(Rebirth is power’s context, its blind métier,
more mysterious than the eel’s migrations.
An invisible tree in blossom. And as the seal

In its fathoms’ deep sleep rises gliding
To the ocean’s surface, takes a shuddering breath
And dives, still sleeping, to the bottom,

So now has the Slumberer inside me secretly
Joined himself with it, and gone, while I stood
Here with my gaze fastened on something else).

And the diesel engine throbbing in the swarm,
Past the dark skerry, past the rock-crevices of birds
Where hunger’s blossoms is the gaping mouths.

You could still hear them as the dark came on:
An undeveloped music, like the sound
The orchestra makes before the piece begins.

But on his ancient sea Vainomoinen drifted,
Shaken in the sea’s pincers or sprawling
In the mirror’s stilled solution where the birds

Are enlarged. And from a waste-seed, very far
From land, at the sea’s end, from the heave of waves
From the banks of shrouded sea-mist it shot up:

An immense tree with scaly bark and leaves
Completely transparent, crystalline, and behind them
The billowing white sails of distant suns

Glided forward in a trance. And already taking off an eagle.

Tr. Robert Hass. I guess this shouldn't be over-interpreted, because Tranströmer's poetry doesn't seem to indulge in symbols and hidden meanings. The birds keep returning throughout the poem apparently as an expression of its song, its poetry.