After an Attack

A poem by Tomas Tranströmer translated from Swedish by Daniel Carden Nemo

_{This is my favorite Tranströmer poem. Hope you like it.}

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Photo by The Metropolitan Museum of Art on Unsplash

The sick boy.
Locked in a vision
with his tongue stiff as a horn.

He sits with his back to the painting of the wheatfield.
The bandage around his jaw resembles an embalming.
His glasses are as thick as a diver’s. And everything’s unanswered
and jars as when the telephone rings in the dark.

But the painting. A landscape of quiet,
though the grain is a golden storm.
Blueweed sky and drifting clouds. Below them
in the yellow surge, a few white shirts sailing: harvesters—
they cast no shadows.

There’s a man standing far across the field
who seems to be looking this way.
A broad hat conceals his face.
He seems to be watching the dark figure here in the room, perhaps to help.

Imperceptibly the painting has begun to widen
and open behind the sick boy,
lost in himself.
It flashes and throbs. Every grain is lit
as if to wake him!
The other man—in the wheat—makes a sign.

He’s come closer.
No one notices.

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From Hemligheter på vägen (Secrets on the Way), 1958

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