A poem from the book” Evening brings everything back”
By Jaan Kaplinski
I came from Tähtvere. It was Sunday evening.
I was the only fare to the final stop.
I stepped out. The road was silent - not a single car.
The wind had fallen silent. Only the stars
and the sickle of the new moon were shining above the river.
I felt sorry I had to go. I would have liked to step
aside from the path onto the wasteland and to stay still,
looking at this moon, these constellations, several of whom
I had forgotten again during the winter. But most of all
at the sky itself, the blue of the sky that was nearly
as deep and strange as once long ago,
twenty years ago when we were sitting and drinking wine
around a campfire in the nearby forest, and I came
back to Tartu on a village road with a girl,
arms around each other's necks.
The blue is much easier to remember
than names, titles or faces,
even the faces of those you have once loved.
Jaan Kaplinski is an outstanding Eastonian poet deserving Nobel Prize. His touching, thought provoking poems and short prose texts often masterfully reveal the mysteries underlying simple phenomena, both household and natural. Stylistically limpid, his poems ask deep questions and emphasize enigmas that surround our existence.
Getting off a bus as a lone passenger and gazing at “the stars and the sickle of the new moon”, for instance, remind the poet of a former fleeting love and make him ponder why it is easier to remember a certain “blue” of the night sky than “names, titles or faces, even the faces of those you have once loved.”
I loved the deceptive simplicity of this verse. I too remember the frames more than the faces
