“I leave my swamps, leave my lands

/ leave my grassy yards.”

                         Runo 24 Kalevala

FOR THE CLUBBERS

A row of lilacs in bloom

beside every house.

The scented air odorous,

fragrant, damp.  Spring earth.

The small, hushed peace of homecoming

descends, as through the covered copse,

wall and tree, a rustle of wind,

in verdant essence flows.

A gentle sway of mountain ash resounds

within my Finnish heart—green meadows,

woods, pines, birches, birds in trees.

In fields they teeter on reeds on yellow wings.

We walk a  long bright green swath,

fenced in by stern gray ghostly granite posts,

the only footprints, ours, in pine-needle sand.

We hear native crows silhouetted

on faraway branches.

Outi, Kalevala teacher,

sits on a wall, her feet splayed,

sings us the Bothnian song.

Looks off into fair spring air in

translation concentration:

“Vasan Marchi

we were born and we grew up

in the wide and open lands

of Bothnia where the seas

and the rivers flow

billows of the green blue sea

we grew up with land cold like its trees

we can’t be frightened by the weather

and even the winters can’t kill us

nor does poverty and misery

of the flat woodland and the wasteland”

Here we are, four hundred years later,

at this coffin-like monument

with its bronze plaque—

Nvijamiehille 1597 (For the Clubbers)—

memorializing the peasant uprising against

the Swedish rulers.

They tell us

we are kin of the rebel,

the peasant leader,

Jakob Ilkka, who

fought on this hill near

our lilac-surrounded family farm,

our ancestral fathers’ land.

Here

our father’s father Herman—

oldest son, so why did he emigrate?

Maybe he sat here, June, 1900

before he left this home ground

for damp, cold, underground, iron mines

on the Marquette Range in Michigan

where he would die of skin rot

where his wife’s brother, Isaki, would die

of a falling chunk in a shaft

only three weeks after arriving.

Here in this grove sacred to my ancestors

among these wild lilacs and green meadows

I realize that what ensued there

was still better than what was possible here.