Håkan Sandell

When I saw one of those men touch your hair, I heard for the first time in many a year the ancient battle trumpets and I saw the banners of an army winding off to war and felt that blind power urging me to knock him out with one punch, send him tumbling to the floor. If nobody had held me back, stopped me, I would—God help me—have killed him on the spot, stomped out his blood, and spit in it. I'm sorry, but you must be aware your winding hair is different now, a hornets' nest, a snakes' lair! Yes, like a ball of snakes in a flower basket, dear.

Poetry rejoices even if the culture dies, over the girl with her first electric, how her high, thin voice, amplified many times over by the loudspeaker, is like a giant's in the green grass of the festival site. Over the fragile bells of digitalis, how they hide the pistil and the pollen inside. Rejoices over rain on the Faroe Islands, over rendezvous on the Champs-Elysées at evening. It rejoices over Japan, over Korea, over arts refined over a thousand years— the art of swordsmanship, or of drinking tea. Rejoices over the poet, that his heart still beats.