Aborigines (Estonia)
- Aborigines (Estonia)“language is the only homeland”— Milosz
In a special audience, with President Meri, who has eight languages under his many belts, his secretaries in the cold palace protected by guards without bullets in their ancient guns, and after exchange, foreign and domestic I read a poem of welcome to him, who could have gone to graduate school in America, but was sent to Siberia instead.
And I wait for the silence which is a bookman’s special pleading, and ask him where, on the map, which is as ancient as his ancestors, where was that town he was sent to: the globe rests on his writing table, but he goes for his books, translated in several languages, for a handwritten inscription from his father, who was a scholar/writer in his own rite, and wrote poetry in Estonia, a poetry unsaid in every privacy, since ‘17.
He points to the outpost, then, casting a glaze across the Bering Sea points to Alaska and beyond: “the only thing that kept me alive in that dreadful time, was the thought of the aborigines”—
this could be Indians surely, the Inuit, who have no written language, but sing their songs of acceptance in tones so sweet even blubber, succulent [End Page 362] in the worst winters, talks back, as every spirit of the world talks back in the song of the singer.
But he does not mean them; he means, it is clear, for the time he takes to make his prepared entrance to the map, he means writers, Americans, who have taken his time from affairs, and he welcomes this time away from disaster.
Only a little later, the whole world comes alive in the estimates of hatch and water in the ferry named for a free country: some nine hundred passengers and crew went down and out and we sent messages to President Meri about bad times, disastrous times, and the nuanced poetry lost with these souls.
I photographed the Estonia from my hotel perch, anchored in a hail of sunlight, a beamridden morning that is not the character of the sea; and when we visited Uswa, and stood before Gustavus Adolphus, and thought of Jesus in the old world, we knew the cadence of this song: aborigines: beginners at the salt-lick of citizenship, paid for in the extreme, and free for the very asking, frostdriven on a map in Siberia.
—for President Meri
Estonia, Sept. 1994
Michael S. Harper is author of several volumes of poems, including Images of Kin and Healing Song for the Inner Ear. He is I.J. Kapstein Professor of English at Brown University, where he teaches courses in creative writing and literature.
