Fairy Tale

He built himself a house,

                   his foundations,

                   his stones,

                   his walls,

                   his roof overhead,

                   his chimney and smoke,

                   his view from the window.

He made himself a garden,

                   his fence,

                   his thyme,

                   his earthworm,

                   his evening dew.

He cut out his bit of sky above.

And he wrapped the garden in the sky

and the house in the garden

and paced a lo in a handkerchief

and went off

lone as an arctic fox

through the cold

unending

rain

into the world.

(Miroslav Holub, English translation by George Theiner)

Locked In

All my life I live in a coconut.
It was cramped and dark.
Especially in the morning when I had to shave.
        But what pained me most was that I had no way
to get into touch with the outside world.
If no one out there happened to find the coconut,
If no one cracked it, then I was doomed
to live all my life in the nut, and maybe die there.
       I died in the coconut.
       A couple of years later they found the coconut,
cracked it, and found me shrunk and crumpled inside.
      "What an accident!"
      "If only we had found it earlier..."
      "Then maybe we could have saved him."
      "Maybe there are more of them locked in like that..."
      "Whom we might be to save,"
they said, and started knocking to pieces every
coconut within reach.
      No use! Meaningless! A waste of time!
A person who chooses to live in a coconut!
Such a nut is one in million!
     But I have a brother-in-law who
lives in an
acorn.

Ingemar Gustafson, English Translation by Mary Swenson