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.
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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