My walk to School
Three flights of steps down the steep bank with the dull, echoing thud of the heavy front door ringing in my ears
as if to say: THERE, now you're on your own .....
.............. On my own, well I did not mind,
it was the normal way to be in our family.
Now, from the bottom step we must run, my sister and I,
across the wide road leading into town - and out of town,
away past fields and forests to all the world beyond.
Did I know then, in the Scandinavian half light,
what a fine walk it was, my walk to school?
That long avenue of tall trees - first we crossed
the little stream with its bubbling lazy sound -then
we passed the tennis courts with the lilac hedges and empty seats - and the old chestnut tree - all silent and bored, like pages in an
old story book, where one could amble along half in ones sleep,
still dreaming - and it was always the same.
Before leaving the avenue, soon to catch sight of the school's
dim lights behind the trees, we passed the Bishop's House,
as ominous as any Wizard's Fortress - but more sad,
for here was a wizard who had lost his touch. I had watched him,
on our class visit, unbearably oppressed by his own presence,
and everyone in the room struggling to breathe.
Come to think of it, that walk meant much to me, more even
than school itself, where I soon discovered that none of my
questions would ever be answered.
How did I fill those long, interminable days, months and years
apart from catching and letting go again, my rambling,
wayward thoughts, and learning as must every child, to live a
double life?
It was all along, a tight-rope walk, every moment to be compelled
to disguise, on the one hand how little ---- and on the other
how much I knew.
Gounil Brown
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Gounil Brown’s Poetry
Gounil is both a poet and an accomplished translator of poetry. Of her own poetry, David Britton has said ‘True poems emerge through the occasional shocks that occur when something within the ordinary wheel of the poet’s existence comes up against the sea of the infinite or the unconditioned to which a true poet’s soul is always trying to point itself… One can tell Gounil Brown has experienced the initial shock and thus has a genuine subject on her hands… Most of Gounil’s poems are founded on a responsiveness to moods in nature, and a recognition, as natural to her as breathing, of the correspondences of these to the dynamic life of the human soul… To such poems one goes back; a time comes around when one needs to read them again’.
Read sample poems
by Gounil Brown:
Edith Södergran : a portrait
My walk to School
The Island
Life
Publications
My Poems & My Translations.
Gounil Brown
Icon Press
ISBN 1873812132
Poems by Edith Södergran.
Translated by Gounil Brown
Icon Press
ISBN 1873812035
Links:
Poet | Translator | Artist | Biography
Icon Press
Wikipedia: Edith Södergran
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