Susurrus
youth whispers: your power leaves you
as I leave you –
as if now we must always stand below
the night’s piano shawl.
a woman says: rose,
grow into a rowan or a raven –
meaning the body holds firmly to its secret.
a woman finds herself
on an ancient coin and a church mural
but this is not her secret.
when she holds her secret,
it opens a door
to all the trees we’ve cut down
meaning asking forgiveness
from the body.
the body is always both mud and root
and remembers its other bodies:
a wolf kneeling to eat strawberries,
a child-muse aging into
a jackdaw lifting so high
the lit broth of the sunset feeds her.
Quietly
moths of steam lift from our tea.
we drink, cup after cup,
the sun rising in our bodies.
you touch my hair.
mother smoothed grandmother’s hair
with a metal comb moulded
entirely of winter.
no tea to revolt against the cold.
grandmother called, come.
a river, she called, come.
mother, a solemn child,
kissed the river
so strongly,
she fell in.
the shy burn quietly, quietly.
when they blush,
mothers stroke their brown hair,
eat the ripe apples of their cheeks.
Milk Teeth
I keep your porcelain shard tooth
as a small white door
through which, even now,
you walk.
the small white doors open
to receive sunlight from all sides,
then ebb.
the Komi believed
a child does not belong to this world
until her teeth grow in.
you only grow more remote
from the rim of being
and nonbeing
where infants sleep.
you know so little of salt, still.
the elsewhere
is already
carved of you,
the way an ivory casket
is already
a coffin for the elephant
despite the lock of hair inside it.
the chalk of your teeth has already written it down.
The following poems were first published in the Autumn 2025 print issue.
The Tome of the Body
the desiring body is the sea,
a sigh in saltblue, eel and reef.
as the sea is plural, so is the body,
antlered and milk-burdened.
as the sea is lasting dismemberment,
so is the body in womanhood
split.
I ask of this sea what is needful.
the sea is a girl with a crushed tongue.
what is heard: mariner sweat
gull wings
nearly braided in intimate nearness.
the erotic wind-weight in my shirt.
the breeze of breathing.
as beavers carve rivers into lakes
I too become another body of water
in a world plagued by water
o body of saliva, salt, birdsong
who have lived and died
as any other, as once
in a prehistoric burial
a child was laid on swan wings
as an oracle was laid on silk
and deer bone: the body is
the precise sentence
the profoundly erotic utters to the dead.
Dialogue with a Stone
I kneel to pick a stone.
the stone says, you are safe here,
and I say to the stone, this year, a country
reaffirmed stoning as punishment,
stoning as death penalty.
I say to the stone, my sister’s face
is water, someone drops
a stone of sorrow
into the water, then another.
the stone insists, you are safe here.
I observe the slow glide of swans –
their necks slip trustingly into the water,
and the water does not behead them.
the swans say, you are safe here.
the sun laughs all day,
I hear her,
so I point out to the sun,
the stones are still falling.
even the lake is no longer
the sleep of rivers, stirred so tirelessly –
the lake says to the swans,
you are safe here, and the stones keep falling.
Mildew, Mildew
in Belgrade, bread
was no longer looted,
girls no longer looted,
a friend took me to see
a bombed building, and I stood
under a hardened sun
trying to grip the wrist
of a more tender world.
in the dove-grey city, I was mute,
the new words fragile in my mouth –
the fruit of speech
mildewed when I spoke.
mildew, mildew, to sing it now,
but then I trembled, starved, still
the glass of a shattered window
never touched my cheeks.
I trembled, starved – hungry,
I thought of my grandmother’s hands
powdered in sugar. I walked across floorboards
creaking like accordions
betraying me – quiet, floorboards,
I needed to think quietly
of those girls, to give zefir, not bread,
bird’s milk, not eggs.
to the one lifting her hand
when a bullet passed her,
mistaking the sound
for a mosquito,
I needed to give a slab of sunflower seed halva,
sugared cranberries, heather honey.
The Boy at the Ballinskelligs Abbey
the boy weaves through graves and grasses.
such boys still surface to roam cemeteries
letting the wind’s feral cats scratch
their cheeks, for the ocean’s rim
ships such winds
even the sleepers gasp.
is he saddened by the eggshells
dried with the leak of life
amid stones and thorned reds?
of those mountains, I say:
the mind is often engulfed
by stark offerings.
it is how he experiences his soul.
the soul flies swiftly through chaos.
ABOUT THE AUTHOR
Triin Paja (b. 1990) is an Estonian poet and translator whose work has received wide acclaim. Her poetry weaves together nature, love, grief, and ancient myths, conjuring incantatory worlds of light and shadow. Shifting between free verse and poetic prose, her writing is vivid and evocative, filled with unexpected turns. Paja writes in both Estonian and English, and her work has been widely published and translated. Her chapbook Sleeping in a Field (2025) won the Wolfson Poetry Chapbook Prize.
The texts presented here were originally written in English and appear here for the first time.
Additional poems by Triin Paja are forthcoming in our autumn print edition.
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