lønningspils

An excerpt from The Seed Vault.

Translated from the Finnish
by Erkka Filander & Gregory M. Conway.

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Capacious friend,
how soft
the skin of the neck
for a thumb to sink in.
Rage;
herring’s reluctant
dead surface, clammy
from lost velocity,
iniquity-coarse.
That their swarm would scintillate on the offing
under the steady strike of the summoning sun.

In this city you live besieged
and everyone in their besiegement
is to their own stranglement seperated.
Night is sick in the kitchen, knives
sharp in their rest; sealed
in the neighbourhood’s windows
is a pastbird’s shrill –
but the laurel-pruned community
sleeps, is awake, sleeps
and collects falling-skin, sweat.

Besieged, dreaming and awake, searches
for a solution. Walks
down a sordid street among squares of shoplights
or the blinding falls of
lily-of-the-valley ridge and
searches for an amputation
for the laced stasis connecting
forehead to forehead. Screaming,
never begun,
becomes familiar there.
You handle your affairs,
carry out the agreed work,
but the year blossoms elsewhere,
in other halls,
and the unpunctured screaming
percieves the other clustering voices
which in a shared muteness
form a kind of harmony.

Friend, in the Spring twilight
the pour-dreams shake
convulsion-familiar ribcages
through which the circle of beauty gathers
propensity against compromise.
On a windy street in the shop deliriums
or in the cool ridge light of the convallarias
it’s possible to experience your trembling
connecting with other convulsions, possible
to find a caesura of stabilization
(for the pulse which
from the first waking moment
is already threatened)
by witnessing a foresight of retribution
puncture the immunities of power.
Violence we will not,
of course, employ,
nor is there any time at all
for non-violence.

Between necessity and disinclination
there must be a breaking, ceremonial, in a patient
rage,in generous rejection,
must, a breaking.

So it might be better if you’d take yourself
to a place of severing, to a place that moves you,
where you are cut off, where
the flashing connections of the mind
are cut off, might perhaps be better
if you’d now take yourself there,
where motionless moves
and breaks open.
These automations
are produced and introduced
to murder us.

Violence could be a gift,
given on behalf of the humanity
which in violence is sacrificed,
she thinks when down the orbits
of the convallarias she lets
the width of her fear slowly slide
as in to a Spring’s cauldron.

Split the face, gouge the eyes, hack
the expression unoccupied,
so you can’t say where the mouth
ends and where something else begins.
To curse is this: after beginning
there’s no end. Your hands
are locked in the wound you’ve caused,
as its rippling rings concentrically expand.

(But another violence shatters law
by denouncement, violence
that renounces the given settings
and bloodlessly butchers law’s dominion
by sitting or walking past
in the simmering calm of a new countenance.)

Those who would not see old laws
in new hands, but rather more constitutive
distribution of this reality or
the blossoming of cut lines and continuums –
the relieved breathing of hiding places -,
those
must find the discipline
of a thunderstrike
and the rose garden left for us
in the electricity of our bodies,
the torque, the jointly
smuggled whisper, the cast mold
for a novel greeting;
that we have permission
in these hands, which
pick up fallen things,
for a gift-like destruction.

That we could be brought
to sermonize a religion of fear
to the rich (our right
to not merely wait in calamity).
A pulpit
out of their living bodies,
for there’s a need to do to them
what they are doing to everything.
A need to offer them delayed,
and now made perpendicular,
consequences.

How soft the skin of the neck
for a thumb to sink in.
Was this human a rotting lamb?
O God O God friend
between necessity and disinclination
is there time at all.

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Editor’s Note:

The Seed Vault (orig. Siemenholvi) was published by Poesia, in the summer of 2025, in a dauntingly beautiful (354pg, 300x400mm, 10lb+) edition. The ambitious nature of the book object extends within the pages; the book is part archaic labyrinth – part contemporary walking tour through a symbolic, and also literal, poetic equivalent of the Svalbard Seed Vault. Alongside longer referential fragmentary sections, a series of verse poems within the text act as a sort of Requiem, with this excerpt, pgs 220-223, being analogous to the Agnus Dei Prayer.

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Erkka Filander is a Finnish poet known for his difficult and form-forward work. Filander has published four books of poetry, which have won several literature prizes and been shortlisted for numerous awards, including the European Poet of Freedom Award in 2018. “Bleak gospel” and “uncompromising” are the descriptions given by the Finnish poet Raisa Marjamäki about Filander’s poetics in her short biography of Filander for the Versopolis Translation Platform. His most recent book, Siemenholvi (Poesia, 2025), is a monumental lamentation, mixing traditional poetical forms and meters with huge fragmentary spaces to create a vault-like book of catastrophe.

Gregory M. Conway is a writer, editor and translator from Curve Lake First Nation. He is the founding editor of Lønningspils and was awarded the CFJ-CBC Indigenous Journalism Fellowship in 2026. He is currently translating Kyborgikesä, a collection of poems by Aura Siltala into English.