Grave Digger from Flag Fjord, The

American Poetry Review, The, Mar/Apr 2008 by Nordbrandt, Henrik

O, shovel! I address myself one day.

This is not the language I would have chosen.

This language will always be the others' property

profoundly incomprehensible

blank and unwelcoming as a bank building

a loan amortized over a life-time.

The price of this language

is death, so the word death is also the word

that is the most natural to pronounce

regardless whose lips it uses.

I would like to abolish it

If I could just continue to say

without hedging what I meant

My greatest animosity against these lines therefore is

that I have written them myself.

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The next greatest is that the others have made up the words.

That's how this language is. That's how

its logic revokes logic

so it just exactly hides the essence of it, it is

like the bank building.

When I had come a little further, the word

death attracted me after all a bit

because of the sound, and the same with lips.

Now I would prefer to delete them both.

Maybe I should pretend that the choice does not exist

If I instead of shovel

at least could have said bell!