Prelude
A poem by Tomas Tranströmer translated from Swedish by Daniel Carden Nemo
Waking is a parachute jump from a dream.
Free of the suffocating whirl,
the traveler dives toward the green zone of the morning.
Things flare up. From the soaring skylark’s
perch, he makes out the mighty tree root system’s
subterranean, swaying lamps. But above ground,
the greenery stands in a tropical current
with raised arms, listening
to the rhythm of an invisible pump. And he
sinks toward summer, lowered
into its bright crater, down
through shafts of green-dampened ages
shaking under the sun turbine. Then
this vertical journey through time ends,
the wings spread into the osprey’s drift
above the streaming waters.
The Bronze Age horn’s outlaw call
hovers over the infinite.
In the day’s first hours, consciousness can take in the world
like a hand clutching a stone warmed by the sun.
The traveler stands under the tree.
After the plunge through death’s whirl,
will a great light open over him?
This is the opening poem of Tomas Tranströmer’s first book, 17 Poems (1954).
He was awarded the Nobel Prize for Literature in 2011.