Four poems by Kim Simonsen, Translated by Randi Ward
Image kindly provided by the author, Kim Simonsen.
This morning the ocean has again tossed man-sized
black boulders up onto the shelves of rock along the shore.
The breakers crash onto the beach,
shred across the strand,
sweep shells and stones gnashing against the black cliffs
as tangled masses and wrack flail about
and resist being dragged back to sea, stretch out to reach deeper
into the shallows and everything woven into the surf,
days and waves,
the ebb and flow of time.
*
Jane Bennett says that poems can help us
get to know the life that resides in things
and reveal more of the vibrancy hidden in them—
can show us even more of the strands
of interconnection that bind us to matter.
The withered grass has cloned itself,
right outside my window
black starlings sing for one another;
their extinct ancestors, the dinosaurs, were the only others
fully able to understand their song.
*
Hélène Cixous and Catherine Clément say
that we are ocean, sand, coral, seaweed, flow, ebb,
children, waves, and mothers.
Ravenous parasites frequent our intestines
and partake of us; we have mites on our faces and bacteria
all through our bodies—we couldn’t exist without them.
Astrida Neimanis says:
the human infant drinks the mother,
the mother ingests the reservoir,
the reservoir is replenished by the storm,
the storm absorbs the ocean,
the ocean sustains the fish,
the fish are consumed by the whale.
*
We always thought about them,
the silvery-green sticklebacks
we dreamt about catching
and taking home with us.
They lived for weeks in muddy washtubs
till entire schools died of starvation.
The stickleback, our tiniest species of fish
and the hardiest among the fish
with those characteristic spikes on their backs;
it makes little difference to sticklebacks that the waves
wash them back and forth between the sea and intertidal pools.
The natural history of the stickleback
is like the obscure history
of the humans
who live in the rain and darkness
of this land
while the third winter storm this week
rages on.
About The Author
Randi Ward is a poet, translator, lyricist, and photographer from West Virginia. She earned her MA in Cultural Studies from the University of the Faroe Islands and has twice won the American-Scandinavian Foundation’s Nadia Christensen Prize. Her work has appeared in Asymptote, Words Without Borders, World Literature Today, and many other publications; her work has also been featured on Folk Radio UK, NPR, and PBS Newshour. She is a recipient of Shepherd University’s Appalachian Photography Award, and Cornell University Library established the Randi Ward Collection in its Division of Rare and Manuscript Collections in 2015. For more information, visit randiward.com.
Kim Simonsen is a Faroese writer and researcher from the island of Eysturoy. He studied creative writing at Forlaget Gladiator’s Writing Academy in Copenhagen and completed his PhD in Nordic Literature in 2012. Simonsen has authored seven books as well as numerous essays and academic articles. He is the founder and managing editor of Forlagið Eksil, a Faroese press that has published over twenty titles. In 2014, Simonsen won the M.A. Jacobsen Literature Award for Hvat hjálpir einum menniskja at vakna ein morgun hesumegin hetta áratúsundið (What good does it do for a person to wake up one morning this side of the new millennium). This poetry collection is forthcoming in English translation from Deep Vellum Publishing in 2025. Simonsen’s latest poetry collection, Lívfrøðiliga samansetingin í einum dropa av sjógvi minnir um blóðið í mínum æðrum (The biological composition of a drop of seawater is reminiscent of the blood in my veins), was nominated for the 2024 Nordic Council Literature Prize.
