14 June - A Day of Mourning in the Baltic States
The Soviet occupation of the Baltic countries as a result of the Molotov-Ribbentrop Pact signed between Nazi Germany and the Soviet Union on 23 August 1939 resulted in mass deportations, which affected people of all nationalities living in Estonia. The two deportations that affected Estonia the most deeply, on 14 June 1941 and 25 March 1949, are annually observed as days of mourning. In commemoration I am re-posting this:
The Islander
Patches of fog, lifting heavily from the water into the warmer air; the planes
didn’t fly last night because of it. Most of the stranded Tallinners took the
earliest busses - homesick I guess for solid ground. The air is full of water;
white dolomite churches rising steeply, snow-still
So many shades of grey: the sky, some trees, water in a drainage ditch,
ice along the edges of a pond is silver pools of snow-melt reflected in a leaden
sky, framed by dead grasses
Stonewalls are blue, lavender, yellow & green; however, moss is emerald -
always, unless it’s velvet brown - the colour of a collar on a child’s
Chesterfield coat. Pines are a different green: murky and dusty - hidden
Scents of burnt brush and rotting leaves, mould turned over: ochre, damp,
brown, muted steel, soggy mist, whispering around the roof tops hunkering
down, a shaggy rumbling bear turning round and around, flattening the lair
before sleep; twigs of pine, birch, ash and oak; the oaks are making a
come-back I hear.
There is no point in describing the rest; the details are too well known by those
who know, and those who don't know by now would never understand. It is
enough to say that I did not return from the cold land. But sometimes, in
that few moments between day and night, in that blue instant between death
and life, I can see her and I remember home.
Its cold here always, very cold; bodies in the permafrost take a long time to
decay. Perhaps that's why, even after all this time I can still hear their voices:
my friends, neighbours, family, desk-mates, shop clerks, teachers, the gulls,
fish, pines singing in the wind, the dead, the unborn and the living.