Øystein Orten: POEMS IN ENGLISH

Elegy                                                

losing seven aunts, all mine

seven aunts, unwed and untouched

with black headscarves and red-checked nylon dresses

selling birches for the womens’s guild and giving of themselves

inch by inch

as young girls they went to school for three weeks

in the fall and three weeks in the spring

and each day a resurrection

then they served after confirmation

on small farms

for the pilot in the fishing village, for the rich man on the moors

the oldest took care of her mother, knitted bed-spreads and read brorson

with a magnifying glass, the youngest engaged to a widower

until the spanish flu took him with it to the chapel

like magpies with silver spoons in their beaks

they flew along the roads, the aunts

let light into our houses

awoke what we’d forgotten in our sleep

with a birch at lent time

(HOMILIE from fluktlinjer 2000 translated into english by Veronika Bonaa)