Work poems

Lev Hrytsyuk and Linn Hansén have drawn my attention to another poetry collection that deals, among other things, with the experience of work in a care home. According to the publisher's blurb, Swedish poet Johan Jönson's 800-page Efter arbetschema (2008), his twelfth volume of verse,  focuses on the reality of work: "dels försörjningsarbetet i vården eller i den tunga industrin, dels ett arbete med att förstå och besvärja 'världsfabriken'."

Although work in a care home is one of its subjects, Jönson's massive book appears to cover a much wider field of concerns than the remarkable first collection by Timo Harju, recently published in Finland, and partly available in English translation on this blog and elsewhere. But it's interesting to see that the subject of work is one that engages the attention of some Nordic poets - it's certainly a topic that's encountered less frequently in contemporary English and American poetry.

Dreams and fears

In Books from Finland magazine, Pia Ingström introduces some of my translations of Timo Harju's poetry, most of which have not appeared in this blog. 

These are the terms – those of ordinary crime journalism –  in which our recent public discussion of long-stay care of the elderly here in Finland was conducted. The discussion was followed by the usual misery of cuts, unchanged diapers, dehydration, over-medication, poor wages for hard work… No wonder that the concept of  ‘healthcare wills’ and ‘living wills’, in which people are supposed to say how they want to be cared for in the last stage of their lives – is acquiring a disturbing undertone of ‘better jump before you’re pushed.’

The house of forgetting - 7

from Kastelimme heitä runsaasti kahvilla (ntamo 2009)

by Timo Harju

[76]

Granny in a cardigan that's fading
slowly evanescing
hands before her on the table
lost in warm grey reflection,
rocking snowflakes in hair’s cradle
eye-sockets full of snow.



translated from Finnish by David McDuff

The house of forgetting - 6

from Kastelimme heitä runsaasti kahvilla (ntamo 2009)

by Timo Harju

[16]

From the sofa a voice was heard: "Suffer the old to come unto me, and forbid them not."
And on the second day: "Whosoever shall not receive the kingdom of God as an old person shall in no wise enter therein. "
The old people’s home is the strange hand of God with which he strokes his thinning hair,
a sudden shower of cackling in the dry linen closet, a bit sad and lonely
God looks out, stirring his cup of tea as though it were on fire.
Had Jesus lived to grow old and gone into an old people’s home
He would have been like these.



translated from Finnish by David McDuff


See also in this blog:

The house of forgetting
The house of forgetting - 2
The house of forgetting - 3
The house of forgetting - 4
The house of forgetting - 5

The house of forgetting - 5

from Kastelimme heitä runsaasti kahvilla (ntamo 2009)

by Timo Harju

[71]

I want to write ofyouforyou, a portrait.
Can I write about you if I don’t dare read this to you?
I’ll try. Now it’s May 25, Ascension Day. I haven’t been
to the nursing home for six months. I don’t know if you're alive or if you’d remember me. I remember you mostly as a little stone: a warm skimming-stone in children’s hands,
the earthworms loosened your heart for good cheer,
but it doesn’t help, we don’t know why
you convulse around me absently, at one corner of your mouth there’s foam.
you dissolve in the blows of your stick, start to cry and howl blindly in all directions.
Wisdom is affection is gone, is a rocking chair
that flies, and you are no more.

[72]

shoes, bedspread, reading lamp, window, snake-plant, pile of house picture magazines. three postcards from grandchildren. canary islands, china, pargas. water jug. water mug. juice jug, juice mug. back braces. spectacles. smell. diarrhea. buttoned shirt. trousers. socks. come through. Thank you. empty ceiling. empty floor. plastic mat. sticky stain. next to table leg. battery clock. walls. entrance to WC. door. window. afternoon.

[74]

Your shoulders and back are stiff
a cry left alone, which cannot find a mouth.
Yes, you can walk when you’re taken for walks.
You can open your mouth when the porridge spoon is moved towards it.
You can lie in bed and cling to the sides of the bed.
You can sit in a chair for many hours
staring at the magazine in front of you
leaning slowly forward.
You just vaporize me absently into you with your eyes.
What’s it like in there, inside you?
Every day your husband comes to smooth your cheek.


translated from Finnish by David McDuff


See also in this blog:

The house of forgetting
The house of forgetting - 2
The house of forgetting - 3
The house of forgetting - 4

The house of forgetting - 4

from Kastelimme heitä runsaasti kahvilla (ntamo 2009)

By Timo Harju

You stumble you tumble, you don’t find your way home,
the vaults of your tongue collapse. The hut of speech falls from the tree,
the shed of words ignites and burns in spring’s forest fire,
the forge of sentences is cold and still, you crouch, don’t rise,
scratching your nose with your absent mind. A nose that’s quite some size.
Goodbye nose.

All round let's sing, make papillotes, we’ve
time for lots of bedtimes, many plates of stew,
much talking.
while, carefully you
bent double
for hours and hours,
pick the crumbs from your pants
goodbye your pants that hold you in
goodbye your veins that keep you full of blood
goodbye your insides wriggling in a sack of skin.

Now, heap of wrinkles and furrows, I want to say
goodbye by having an early night,
by making my hands go every which way.
I start to wave in the empty room, goodbye goodbye...
How to say it, tomorrow you may not be here.
Your toenails, your dry soles, the fallen arches of your feet,,
your swollen ankles will be gone, your listless painful calves, their skin,
your knees, your knee joints, resting place of hands on thigh,
the thinning hair, the yelping tremors of your legs,
your worn out willies, dented hips
and all the body’s other scrips and strips.

When I asked you to get your stick from your room
you came back leaning on a toilet brush.
Hallelujah you cried when you couldn’t remember hi-de-hi.
You don’t cry hallelujah any more. Apart from that I don’t know much.
I've seen a photo album, which is hidden well,
so you won’t shred more photos in your zeal
yes and I’ve seen the harmonica you could sometimes play,
I’m here in my overalls, and so are you.
Which is why I’m saying goodbye to you.
I’m trying not to sit on top of you.

Goodbye your memory which I don’t know.
Goodbye your memory which you don’t know.
Goodbye chairs, carpets, ceilings, cabinets,
goodbye path of rooms, shadows of objects
whose flowering the others didn’t see.
Why the hell have you gone and broken now?

The care home’s in a mess old women burst from heads,
the stuffing rolls down the corridors hairy and sprattling
shy and smarting and kicking and sparkling and
softly eyeglass-like screaming prattling
and why has the stuffing in your head run out?
Why hasn’t your life stopped, is some soul alive in you instead?
What is really going on here?
goodbye your stooped and crazy mornings
goodbye your squelching
goodbye your vulnerable tenacity
goodbye your name
goodbye your nameless you
Look
a closet bright with clouds
you can flap your hands
Bye bye airy reeds, and sea and sky,
suspenders stuck in a wc. goodbye.

translated from Finnish by David McDuff

See also in this blog:

The house of forgetting
The house of forgetting - 2
The house of forgetting - 3

The house of forgetting - 2

Reviewing Timo Harju's We watered them abundantly with coffee in Hbl, Pia Ingström makes the central point about the poems in this collection:

Det är inget vanvårdsinferno Harju beskriver, utan en vanlig, hyggligt välskött åldringsavdelning. Han är inte ute efter den socioekonomiska problematiken, utan den existentiella.

What Harju describes is not some inferno of neglect, but an ordinary, decently well-kept care home for the elderly. The problems he uncovers are not socio-economic but existential.

See also: The house of forgetting

The house of forgetting

Finnish poet Timo Harju did his obligatory civil service working as an attendant in a nursing home for elderly people. Now he has written a collection of poems - his first - about the experience. The book's title is We Watered Them Abundantly with Coffee (Kastelimme heitä runsaasti kahvilla, ntamo, 2009), and there follow some excerpts from its early pages.


1.

Moisture seeps through the seams of the TV,
the grandfather clock that no longer chimes,
through the neatly made bed, the photographs.
The tears go flowing under the door,
turn down the corridor, roll into the lift,
then another corridor, not far to the front door now,
they’ll get out of the front door! they’ll get out!
the nurses dash after the tears grab hold of them
and coax them back inside by force. I write
a spanner in the waterworks. a wrench.


2.

Leaving means hugging one another
like crushed blueberries.
A year ago behind that door
the nursing home director warned
that the people here were not exactly
sweet old grannies and granddads.
Perhaps it was a joke.

3.

I’d like the nursing home to open wide,
for all the doors to fold and hide
and the grannies and granddads go fluttering out
with their wrinkles their wheelchairs
rushing bright as a cow field in spring.
But they don’t run, so come and see
the clouds in the nursing home corridors.


***

Ward A5, Wednesday

make breakfast sandwiches
(thin layer of margarine and one slice of ham)
wash kitchen floor
take porridge to table next to bed
pull blanket away neatly
give medication
carry to WC
put on trousers
(rub legs down first)
put on braces
take porridge
serve porridge
get new asthma inhaler from medicine cabinet
clean and make bed
change towels in rooms
turn off TV
put on pleasant music
have coffee
carry chest of drawers to basement
make lunch sandwiches
take residents’ laundered clothes to closets
read newspaper aloud
put spoon in open mouth
(if the upper denture falls out, it may need
more adhesive powder and pushing
firmly)
wipe purée off table and from under table
do washing-up
sneak couple of biscuits from kitchen cupboard
find dead granny on floor of room
(plastic bag on head and telephone cord)
serve afternoon coffee
(two black and fifteen white
though now only fourteen white)

***

Ward A5, Thursday


The clouds in the nursing home corridors, sky-open springlike after a bathe
and forgotten, in a frayed blue dressing-gown beside an osiery.
The grannies in the nursing home corridors, the last beautiful pride
you keep in a small wooden box behind your forehead:
if the lid opens by accident all the things may drop to the floor
topsy-turvy you won’t be able to find them, your back won’t let you
you won’t recognise them any more even if you do.
the springtime your insides to pieces.
Here they come, the grannies.
Better to stay here indoors, the journey to the dining room is a rough one
exposed like this
a long way and all by sleigh.
You stare at the keyhole: the clouds are coming.

translated from Finnish by David McDuff