Upsoaring wings: The world is a white laundry

In honor of my friend, Viking Maiden, for today’s National Poetry Month entry, we’ll go to Denmark. I did not know Inger Christensen (1935-2009) before now, but I really like her stuff. She didn’t view poetry as “truth” but as “a game, maybe a tragic game—the game we play with a world that plays its own game with us.”

Word.

One of her major works, Alfabet, combines the alphabet and the Fibonacci sequence, which deserves major props, and it’s very much in the “game” arena.

I’m giving you “From April: IV”, which has very striking—grotesque, even—imagery.

Already on the street

with our money clutched

in our hands,

and the world is a white laundry,

where we are boiled and wrung

and dried and ironed,

and smoothed down

and forsaken

we sweep

back

in children’s dreams

of chains and jail

and the heartfelt sigh

of liberation

and in the spark trails

of feelings

the fire eater

the cigarette swallower

come

to light

and we pay

and distance ourselves

with laughter.