Heidi Liehu
Heidi Liehu — author and philosopher (b. 1967) has published five collections of poems and the novel Rakkaus Pariisissa (Love in Paris). In addition to them, she has published several works of philosophy, the most well-known of which is Perhosten valtakunta (The Butterfly Empire), more than thousand pages of feminist philosophical analysis of culture and an utopia.
THE OUTERMOST IS NOT FAR AWAY
So that I would hear
the sea wildly wave its wet fist before me
so that a dog would leap up high from the scene
from the fifth quarter
glove in mouth
and speed past me
I am,
in a fierce wind in a fierce summer
tree’s millebuddha struggles
wearing all his ornaments.
I am,
naked death
sleeps somewhere,
I am,
From Pitkät hyvästit (The Long Goodbye), 1995. Translated by Seija Paddon.
I impress into my mind:
ship’s wreck rests at the sea bottom,
wave abandons rock,
thousand directions
I am
I
to splintered cities,
I
to twilight
without depth,
to statues water makes
to light’s copper
light’s copper
light’s
deceit
To the hastening
dusk
- So that I would hear
- Fresh yesterdays
- My face
- This forever
- Which tomorrow is curtained by…
- It is summer again
- I would choose
- Sky: cold
- You are
- This tempo, this
- We have so little time
- In moon’s cool favour
- You’ll have a story about
- I am twenty-seven
- In the park
- Let us live as if forever
- Here nothing costs much
- The road awaits eruption
- I try to get used to
- Mosque of rain