100K Presents: 2011 Nobel Prize in Literature Champion Tomas Transtromer's The Couple

[100K Poets Making A Difference]

This is what a happy poet named Tomas Transtromer looks like after winning the Noble Prize in literature for living poetry all his life. (this photo courtesy of EPA)

I knew more about Robert Bly the translator of this poem than I did about Tomas Transtromer until Transtromer won the Nobel Prize for Literature this year. He's slinging verbs for decades...80 years old... and on Saturday December 10 he'll pick up his prize, which I believe is 1.5 million dollars.

THE COUPLE

They turn the light off, and its white globe glows
an instant and then dissolves, like a tablet
in a glass of darkness. Then a rising.
The hotel walls shoot up into heaven’s darkness.

Their movements have grown softer, and they sleep,
but their most secret thoughts begin to meet
like two colors that meet and run together
on the wet paper in a schoolboy’s painting.

It is dark and silent. The city however has come nearer
tonight. With its windows turned off. Houses have come.
They stand packed and waiting very near,
a mob of people with blank faces.

By 2011 Nobel Laureate King of Poetry Tomas Transtromer
Translated from Swede-style by Robert Bly

[Author-Poet Aberjhani]

Truly love the Transtromer video and this poem. You can't go wrong with him because his work comes from the places in our lives where we live most sincerely, powerfully, and vulnerably. Blessings,

Aberjhani