Edith Sodergran Quotes & Sayings

Homecoming

My childhood's trees stand rejoicing around me: O human!
and the grass bids me welcome from foreign lands.
I lean my head in the grass: now home at last. — Edith Sodergran

That the stars are adamant
everyone understands
but I won't give up seeking joy on each blue wave
or peace below every gray stone. — Edith Sodergran

In far-off lands stand the great stones
on which my thoughts rest.
It was a foreigner who wrote the strange words
on the hard board that is called my soul.
Days and nights I lie and think
about things that never happened:
my thirsty soul was once given a drink. — Edith Sodergran

Love
My soul was a light-blue gown, sky-coloured;
I left it on a cliff by the sea
and naked I came to you, resembling a woman.
And like a woman I sat at your table
and drank a toast with wine and breathed in the scent of several roses.
You found me beautiful, resembling something you'd seen dreaming,
I forgot everything, I forgot my childhood and my homeland,
I knew only that your caresses held me captive.
And, smiling, you took up a mirror and bade me look.
I saw that my shoulders were made of dust and crumbled away,
I saw that my beauty was sick and had no desire other than to - disappear.
Oh, hold me close in your arms, so tightly that I need nothing. — Edith Sodergran

Of all our sunny world, i wish only for a garden sofa where a cat is sunning itself — Edith Sodergran

I live on in the sweetness of old days
with strangers who build new dwellings
on blue hills up to the edge of the sky,
I talk softly with the captured trees
and comfort them sometimes.
How slowly time consumes the core of things,
and soundlessly treads fate's heavy heel. — Edith Sodergran

The inner fire is the most important thing mankind possesses. — Edith Sodergran

I am no woman. I am a neuter.
I am a child, a page-boy, and a bold decision,
I am a laughing glimpse of a burning sun
I am a net for all voracious fish,
I am a toast to every woman's honor,
I am a step toward chance and disaster,
I am a leap in freedom and the self
I am the blood's whisper in a man's ear,
I am the soul's shiver, the flesh's longing and denial,
I am an entry sign to new paradises
I am a flame, seeking and jolly,
I am a water, deep, but daring up to the knees,
I am fire and water, in sincere context, on free term — Edith Sodergran

Ripe summer's sweetness dripped
in pearls from every tree
and into my opened heart
a little drop ran down. — Edith Sodergran

I don't create poetry, I create myself, for me my poems are a way to me. — Edith Sodergran

My self-confidence comes from the fact that I have discovered my own dimensions. It does not behoove me to make myself smaller than I am. — Edith Sodergran