An old man,
His grandcild on his lap,
Tells a tale
That the little one will never forget
Of wild reindeer,
Northern Lights
And a native way of life.
The years went by.
The granfather has long passed on.
Yet the vision is still alive
Of a long kept desire.
Up, up north
Where my heart longs to be.
To eternal darkness
And the midnight sun.
Up to where all my dreams
Are leading me
And the wild country
Calls.
The wild rivers
Will wash away all my troubles of the past
While I taste my first breath
Of crystal fresh air.
Eventually I will be one
With the infinity of the tundra,
With each feathered cloud in the amazingly blue sky
And the heartbeat of the wilderness will be my own!
Then I soar to the Heavens
As I feel the pulsing of therunning wild life.
Serenity is the state of mind
In which I realize, I have finally come home.
The poem is from the book "Solkrogen" which I wrote several years ago. The story of the poem (not the one of the book!) is my own. During WWII my grandfather was in Spitzbergen (Svalbard!) and I of course had to ask him all about his deployments. Well, as most veterans, he also was quite traumatized and wasn't much for talking, neither about life in the trenches (many of his generation were this "lucky" that they had to fight in both wars...), nor the conditions in the POW-camp up north (WWII)... but little by little I did get some things out of him and the thing he really loved to talk about, was the aurora borealis! He said, everybody should make sure to see the northern lights at least once before he died!
