Seeds, Not Graves

tell me there remains a reason

         to wave goodbye

                  to the greater white-fronted geese,

the bedsprings of their flock

         creaking, now, over our village.

                                    to blush hearing the lovers.

they come from northern Siberia:

         methane and lichen,

                                    oil wells and turnips.

they remember the cold

         as a silence inside the skull,

                           the ice as the dead covered in light.

they say I have squandered my time—

         my books, my cups of tea—

                  it is true, meaninglessness has been an angel,

but today I dug, with bare hands,

                  wet seeds out of the pumpkin.

                                             I ask nothing, only

let me always dig seeds, not graves,

         not again the timid dog

                                    under the apple tree,

the black tulips of his eyes we watered.

         let me be lush, doomed,

                                    like all gardens,

and as a garden, let me forget

                  the dead feel the rain

                                             kneading their soil.

---

TRIIN PAJA is an Estonian poet, author of four collections of poetry in Estonian. Her English poetry has appeared in Poetry Magazine, Ploughshares, Rattle, Prairie Schooner, Colorado Review, Alaska Quarterly Review, and elsewhere, and her chapbook, Sleeping in a Field (2025), won the Wolfson Poetry Chapbook Prize.

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