Tales of the Midnight Sun

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!