Small Poems for a Nordic Childhood
by D.I. Suikkanen
Some things are too small for a book and too good to lose. These poems are that kind of thing.
We wrote them for the parents and grandparents who read this little press: one each day through August, about puddles and bilberries, wool jumpers and dark evenings, the ordinary furniture of a northern childhood. Here are the ten that readers kept, and two written since.
Read them aloud. They were built for it.
The Puddle
A puddle waited by the gate, as patient as a pond, and late the boots it hoped for came at last, the splash was heard three gardens past, and every puddle down the lane prayed quietly that night for rain.
Bilberries
Go up the hill with cup and can when bilberries are blue, and eat as many as you pick, the forest hopes you do. Come home with purple fingertips and purple on your chin, for summer keeps a register and stains will count you in.
The Stick
There's nothing here, the child said. And Nothing said, Quite right, and handed him a crooked stick that was a sword by night, an oar across the afternoon, a flag, a horse, a throne. There's nothing like a nothing day for making worlds your own.
Mud
Let them wade the ditch today, let trousers go the muddy way. The washing line can take the strain; a childhood does not come again.
The Quiet
We took our quiet for a walk along the needle floor. The pines looked after it so well it grew a little more, and when we brought it home again and hung it in the hall, the house felt like a Sunday and nobody talked at all.
The Apple Tree
The apple tree stood modestly through March and May and June, then hung itself with lanterns like a garden's rising moon. Eleven months of plainness for one month dressed in red. Be patient with the quiet ones. They're saving up ahead.
Chanterelles
The chanterelles are up again where chanterelles were last, and everyone who knows the place walks by it, walking fast, and answers, when the neighbours ask, with vague and airy sounds. A Finn will share most anything except her picking grounds.
The Coat Hooks
The hooks beside the door hold coats for rain and wind and snow, and one small hook, the lowest one, for someone still to grow. The weather does its worst all year, the hooks do not complain. A family is mostly this: the right coat for the rain.
The Jumper
The jumper spent the summer asleep upon its shelf, and kept, the way that wool does, your shape inside itself. Now autumn's at the window and cold is in the lane. Put on your own warm outline. Welcome home again.
The Dark
The dark comes early in the north, and down the road we go past window after window lit by people that we know, and every lamp in every house says somebody is in, and dark is just the big soft coat the winter wraps us in.
The Jar
I put a birch leaf in a jar to keep the autumn in, and closed the lid on yellow light before the frosts begin. A beetle climbed the wooden lid and sat there half the day, to guard the little bit of sun in case it got away.
The Late Bee
The garden's gone to seed and rain, the bees have flown away, but one late flower kept its gold for one who chose to stay. I told her softly, with one hand, that summer's time was through. She didn't lift her head at all. She had her work to do.
A note on the poems
They are written in the register of the old children's verse: proper rhymes, things you can see, and one small truth arriving at the end. If they belong anywhere, it is on a kitchen wall, or in a bedtime.
If the poems send your children outside, the Print-at-Home Edition has a whole Nordic year of seasonal activities to print and play.
If you would like to hear when something new is written, our newsletter is called Letters from the North. The signup lives at the bottom of every page on this site.
