> Hello Christina,
                  Many thanks for your comments. I´ll give consideration to your suggestions. One thing that seems to have come out of other comments on this one is the difficulty of basing a poem on a literary subject that may not be familiar. I´d sort of hped that the descriptive element would stand alone but it´s inevitable that readers get distracted by wondering who Linna is and wondering what references they´re missing. I guess your query about the real significance of dawn to sundown comes into the same category. I´m very unsure what to do about this one altogether. Oh well.
As a matter of interest, dawn till sundown at harvest time in the south of Finland would mean approx 5 a.m. till 10 p.m. Tenant farmers in the period described in part one of Linna´s trilogy would have been obliged to work on their landlord´s farm during daylight hours under their rental agreements. Since they also had to get the crops in off their own land too they continued to work through most of the night. The moon was known as the tenant´s sun at that time, which sounds poetic, and it is, but the metaphor contains much bitterness. 




Best wishes,    Mike


> 
> 
> Morning Mike,
> I enjoyed reading this very visual piece.  I'll pop a thought in the text and brackets around anything that might be superfluous (in my not too intelligent opinion).
> bw
> christina
> 
> 
> The Finnish novelist, Väinö Linna (1920-1992), wrote historical novels in the realist tradition. His best-known works are the trilogy, Under The North Star, which describes events in Finland from the 1880s to 1950s and how these affect the lives of a group of characters in a village in the south of the country, and The Unknown Soldier, which describes the experiences of a machine gun company during the Continuation War of 1944 against Russia.
> 
> 
> On Reading Väinö Linna
> 
> Dusty roads disappear between trees.
> Fields yellow (under the sun)
> where the scythe´s blade (once) swung
> from Nordic dawn till sundown.
> 
> *** I think I need more information about the timespan between Nordic dawn and sundown.
> 
> The illumination of each tree, the mower´s
> unsteady foot on the threshold,
> light cast on each door jamb, range
> and outhouse, the retreat of snow
> 
> across the courtyard in spring;
> yes, we have stumbled among
> these (very) things, clumsy
> as a horse that hauls logs through bog.
> 
> Boulders stand beside ditches
> with the clarity of sunlight
> catching birch leaves and the weight
> of words cut into stone.
> 
> There are days when wind crashes
> through branches and the lake
> is the colour of lead when we take
> water for washing, but the land is at peace.
> 
> The wooden walls of the crofter´s cottage
> have greyed with age. These beams
> have settled and seem permanent now.
> 
> 
> 
> 
> 
> Mike
>