by the birdriver

some people

2011-10-11T12:00:00.000+03:00

some people
are warriors
some just worriers

one should

2011-09-02T23:22:00.001+03:00

”one should always be quite candid”
but what if it’s in my nature
to conceal my soul

no thorns, though

between the rain

2011-07-09T22:56:00.001+03:00

between the rain
obeying one's obsessions
photographing in the garden

mosquitoes' dance

2011-05-03T13:25:00.004+03:00

the mosquitoes' pale dance
ready to suck
for their lives

and then some

2011-04-13T23:47:00.001+03:00

and then some
have so much hatred in them
that they suck all the energy
from innocent passers-by

November blues

2010-11-09T22:17:00.001+02:00

November blues
deepening with darkness
too much chocolate
and self-hatred

couldn't I sleep till Christmas
or even better
- spring

just moments before

2010-10-14T22:05:00.002+03:00

just moments before
November darkness
play of light

Lessons

2010-09-09T17:37:00.003+03:00

Today I learned I could call myself multilingual.
My only hindrance until this day
had been my natural modesty. ;)
Well, in case of choice,
why not use the broader definition...

I woke up

2010-06-14T22:54:00.005+03:00

I woke up
in the end of May

from barely
surviving

to enjoying
summer and gardening

if i stopped

2010-04-10T02:34:00.001+03:00

she's going to heaven

i'm going through hell

what if i just stopped
how would they do then
who would take care of him
who would arrange the funeral
whom would they then scold

long Friday

2010-04-02T17:29:00.002+03:00

longest
most silent
Friday
grieving over
their grandma

dawn

2010-02-10T09:43:00.002+02:00

a new dawn
sudden burst
anticipating spring

wave motion

2009-12-19T14:36:00.006+02:00

in this country
the cruellest month is November

why then, we've passed it long ago,
already counting days till Christmas,
and I'm still dwelling
at the bottom of the wave
and they're getting deeper
each year and every day

larches

2009-10-20T12:49:00.000+03:00

larches
in yellow dresses
rake competing with leaves

October sun

2009-10-20T11:51:00.006+03:00

October sun slowly climbing
above the misty clouds
porches in need of winter-clearance

I think my haikus are too long. This one I tried to separate in five lines as if it could rather have been a tanka (though I don't know if that matters in contemporary English tanka) but it didn't work that well. My Finnish poems usually turn into being tankas, and then always written in five lines with exactly the right number of syllables. I still have some studying and practising in writing Japanese style poetry in English and actually I haven't yet practised a lot...

I am not afraid

2009-07-23T10:26:00.002+03:00

I am not afraid of water
not anymore
and almost not at all

true princesses

2009-07-23T10:10:00.002+03:00

do true princesses
respect window sills
or conquer them like mine

today by the river

2009-06-26T23:08:00.004+03:00

what else is needed
than a cherished place
where eyes rest

Scotch rose

2009-06-11T13:26:00.011+03:00

          promises in buds
          in fields and in dreams
          reaching the skies

Scotch rose Rosa pimpinellifolia 'Plena'

lazy morning

2009-06-09T13:48:00.013+03:00

lazy morning
stayed until
afternoon was ripe

I wonder if this is a haiku. I should probably study English haiku and tanka writing as well as English syllables to know... I already learnt that the counting of syllables is not that strict in English tanka and haiku writing.

Edit. 09/06/09. I have edited this poem twice and taken off "useless" words.

mummy's best friend

2009-06-05T21:48:00.007+03:00

Tantrum after tantrum
      "mummy's stupid"
              she says.
Sometime between them
the sweetest angel
showing me four fingers
and asking
      "am I this old, mummy?"
Terrible twos
       going
         towards
                    terrible threes.
Giving me as many hugs
as the fingers she's showing.
Telling me
      "you're my best friend, mummy".

New clothes

2009-06-05T10:58:00.005+03:00

I got new clothes for this neglected blog of mine. They are from Keisarin uudet vaatteet (there's also a link in the upper left corner) made by Elegia. I originally had Scribe in by the birdriver to keep this different from Minima of my first blog Virtaavat ajatukset which has later moved to Wordpress. This new blog template (SuviSuomi) follows nicely the brown look Scribe has. I had to change the text colours to little bit darker but otherwise Minima works just fine.

Keisarin uudet vaatteet blog templates are easy to install. This one was just added as a gadget. Best Blogspot template to use these with is Minima but they could be used with Scribe too, I tried that but preferred Minima Lefty instead.

Hopefully the new outlook of my blog will encourage me to post more.

Arrival

2009-04-16T21:39:00.005+03:00

I tried hard not to notice it

but I failed.

Hid my eyes behind dark glasses

but could not avoid seeing the light.

I had to give up my longjohns,

start scraping the lawn with my rake

and admit it.

Even if I were not ready for it

the nature is.

Spring has arrived.

carrying

2009-03-18T21:29:00.003+02:00

Anxiety fills my heart.

Before I was a mother

little did I know about it.

Now, the joy and pain all mine,

to be carried with me

for the rest of my life.

Since though I no longer carry them

forever will they remain in me

and I will carry on

carrying

in my heart.

mind's pictures

2009-03-17T18:22:00.007+02:00

Is there a greater pain

than that of a mother

wishing all the good of the world

for her child

but fearing for the worst of worst

hoping to have the ability

not to let the mind

draw its obscure pictures

but to stick to the facts.

mints

2008-06-11T23:50:00.003+03:00

I'm thrilled! The mints have survived. That is the mints that our friends in Hampshire gave us when we visited them last summer. The mints traveled to Finland through various places including Guildford, Cambridge and Nottingham and they were still alive when we arrived home more than a week after they had been taken from our friends' garden.

I planted the mints to a very temporary place last summer since I had no herb garden yet. They lived through the summer and outlived all the weeds around them.

This spring I started to look for them. The pineapple mint I could easily find since it looks a little different from the other plants around the place. But I couldn't find the regular mint. I thought it should have been hardier than the pineapple mint but I just couldn't find it so I thought it had died.

Sometimes I sensed the sweet smell of mint in my nose but since I couldn't find anything on the ground I thought I'd been mistaken. Tonight when I started to water the rows I had just seeded I sensed the smell again. And I found the mint, next to the apple tree where I had looked for it before, on my way to the water container. The mint looked superb and very much grown so I don't understand how I can have missed it earlier.

Now the mints are both planted in a better place where they hopefully will grow well. Maybe I should start worrying more about them growing too well...

summer morning

2008-06-04T11:12:00.002+03:00

a bright summer morning up on the hill behind the house

garden progress

2008-05-21T12:56:00.002+03:00

I don’t know if I expected my garden to look more finished in our fourth summer of living in this house. I know some gardens look very finished at this stage but ours doesn’t. Some gardens probably have spent much more money from their owners’ purses than ours has, and have employed professionals planning and planting which ours hasn’t.

I made a garden plan before we moved in but we had practically no time to anything according to the plan until the first summer which was after a little less than a year’s worth of living here. There have been several things slowing down my garden work, one of course the pregnancy and first year of our semi-demanding youngest child. Others reasons include occasional lack of garden enthusiasm although that probably isn’t very significant.

In time of a sudden desperation of never-getting-anything-done it is good to remind myself of the state of this garden four years ago: There was a sandy desert in the middle of weed fields. There was construction rubbish scattered everywhere around the house: pieces of timber, broken tiles, curved rusty nails. The nowadays most used way to the main entrance of house was part of the weed field. There were no garden plants anywhere, just those that grow here naturally, and the latter being dominated by high grass.

Since then we’ve build the way to the main entrance nice and firm and formed many other parts of the plot to their current state. We have laid a stone retaining wall, founded and sown a thick lawn for ball games to be played on it and planted dozens of small bushes to slope parts of the plot. There are crocuses, spring lilies, daffodils and tulips in several parts of the plot. The meads have been taken care of, some of the plants weeded, some moved to a better or more suitable place to grow in.

A huge amount of work has been done every year. My garden plan has changed over the years. Most of all I’ve added to my plan elements based on ideas I’ve gathered by keeping my eyes open whenever going anywhere from the garden of our own. I’ve browsed and read gardening books and magazines in Finnish and in English. I’ve taken pictures of beautiful English gardens on our trips there.

At the moment our garden looks like a Finnish country garden – that is it looks like a garden, not a wild forest. I have still so much to do about it to even partially meet my plans that I dare not to make a full list of things to be done. The-English-garden part of our garden so far only lives in my thoughts and dreams, there are not even lists of plants or illustrated plans of it. But it will be there one day. Until then I’ll just keep digging and weeding and planting and planning.

sunny morning

2008-05-20T20:42:00.003+03:00

Today I finally managed to get a sunny picture of the view towards the river which is maybe quite far from the lense and not so easily recognisable...

profits at all costs

2008-05-16T22:57:00.005+03:00

Go on and sell
formula powder to developing countries
give free samples
You make mothers
who naturally breastfed
believe formula is
superior to their milk
Who cares if a couple of
hundred, thousand or hundred thousand infants
die of dirty water
even though their mothers could have given them
the best and safest food on earth
Sleep tight through the night
profits under your pillow
skeletons of a hundred thousand children under your bed

Through the weekly Finnish blogging event Runotorstai (Poem Thursday) I learnt about Bloggers Unite - blogging for help and their event on May, 15th, to blog about Human Rights. I was inspired to roughly translate my original Runotorstai's poem in English. This is about children's right to breastmilk (bestmilk).

spring rain

2008-05-15T15:31:00.005+03:00

Spring rain by the birdriver - nature had hard time deciding whether to pour down simply raindrops or something between snow, sleet and hailstones.

living by the birdriver

2008-05-15T09:21:00.004+03:00

We have a view of the birdriver nearby. There are fields and a small country road between our house and the river but a view of the river we do have, however distant it may be. The river is very inviting, we are already waiting anxiously for the weather to warm up enough so the children could go swimming there. In summer they swim in the river and in winter they skate on the ice of the ditch wide enough coming from the river towards the fields. In spring the cranes stop by the river among many other birds. Some times in spring the river floods and the water pours on the closest field. A few years back we had such a rainy summer that the river flooded in the middle of the summer and as the result the children went rowing on their grandparents' barley field.

The river is very dear to me because I've lived by it since my early childhood excluding only a few years of studying elsewhere or living abroad. The riverside is a place where to find a sanctuary, to let the eyes rest on the surface of the slowly flowing water and to let the thoughts flow with it.