The Way Into
You don’t know
that moment, when your parents
set you in motion.
You don’t know the way
in to your own life;
you don’t know their positions,
whether they were between cities
or in a field, at the forest’s edge
at home, or in a village.
You don’t know
what your mother said first,
or your father
in the moments after.
You don’t know
what your father saw,
where your mother’s gaze fell.
Maybe your fate lies
in just that moment;
maybe all is written there,
if only we knew
if only we understood.
To climb to the tip
of a treetop
with a rope and saw in hand,
to trim off the rotten, withered branches
so they don’t harm the tree
or threaten anyone in stormy weather;
or to hesitate beneath the tree,
afraid the branches
will fall on your head;
or to run in fear of the falling branches;
or to simply let them fall.
On to others.
On to yourself.
Or, working downwards
from the very top,
to cut down the tree
piece by piece …
What is our fate?
Start-Up Culture
Hopefully, a drug
that slows down ageing
will finally be discovered
with the help of hundreds
of elderly Estonians.
In order to detect
the onset of the dying process,
all that’s required is to
extract a syringe of blood
from each
of six hundred old people,
to pour the blood
into an old milk churn
and to leave it on a stand
at the crossroads
for twenty-one days.
Then, on a Thursday
when the moon is full,
the blood will reveal the secret
just as people once gleaned
the language of the birds
or found the raven stone
or devised the magic
hat of nail parings.
They call this process
start-up culture.
Translated by Ian Gwin
ABOUT THE AUTHOR
Maimu Berg (b. 1945) is an Estonian writer, critic and translator. She began her career as a literary critic in the 1980s and published her first book in 1988. Since then she has written novellas, plays, short stories, essays, columns and poetry, while also working as a journalist and editor. She has translated Finnish literature into Estonian and spent many years at the Finnish Institute in Tallinn.