Seed in Snow

This first US publication of Knuts Skujenieks—one of Latvia's foremost contemporary poets—is the author's most important and widely-translated body of work. Convicted in 1962 of anti-Soviet sentiment, Skujenieks wrote these poems during seven years of imprisonment at a labor camp in Mordovia. Vivid and expressive, this collection overcomes the physical experience of confinement in order to assert a limitless creative freedom.

A Love Poem

I would like clarity. To exclude
A relationship's tangled yarn.
Not a word.
Let reaction suffice.

So. Only so. And if the two of us
Are pitched alone against the world,
That we can instantly swing about
From face-to-face
And stand back to back.

Would that be too much?
But a poem cannot be written
If one awaits the bullet
From the back,
And not from the front.