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Wordless on the Shore
Triin Paja
seashells break into broken nails
on the shore
where a village drunk sits
by the water’s
salt-crocheted edge.
there was a time when
I played with his daughter.
she liked the sweet taste of beer.
we had lived for a decade.
the father read and read until
his pain grew tender
like a boy’s nettle-blistered ankles
running in a field.
then the village library was closed
and he drank until his house
was an empty jam jar,
until his window
was only the wide mouth
of water, until his daughter grew thin
like tea sediment
then disappeared entirely.
he drinks. shadows, arboreal and human,
run towards him like horses.
he is more horse than horseman
but once, his palms curved into psalms
humming safety.
he was a boy once, nothing wormed
in the polished fruit
of his flesh.
a crow lifts from the shore.
the crow’s cawing chars
the air, rousing him.
neither knows beauty that is not violent.
from the journal THE JOURNAL 
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Color image of the cover of Brandon Brown's book, Work
"A Conversation with Brandon Brown"

"When I’m in the space of the poem, I find this extra power. There is something extra-sensory about it. I feel like when I’m writing a book the trash is smellier, the wine more delicious. But I’m also conscious of wanting (sometimes) to charm someone with my poem, and one way to try to charm someone I guess is to express something mundane or unheroic....in a way that is funny or sad or dramatic or exaggerated." 

via POETRY NORTHWEST
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Cover image of In the Same Light: 200 Tang Poems for Our Century
What Sparks Poetry:
Wong May on In the Same Light

"Writing poetry or reading a poem is by nature a transgressive act.
You are transgressing a stranger’s consciousness. This stranger may be yourself.
Translating an ancient text & you are transgressing above all against Time.
When the work goes well, you are translating without acknowledging Time."
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