Late at night you put your ear to my belly,
seeking out its unsettled music.
It’s still there, and so am I,
translating thunder.
All January we sat
like a twinned mollusk in this house,
thigh to thigh. We glued the mattress to the ground
and set the bedframe on the street:
friend, you and I are so much children of the air
we don’t need to hang high.
Like the wind, we often smell of trash.
If we could, we would hover above the country
and prod at the apples, groaning down flues
and up skirts—we are an untranquil music.
Friend, I fear my soul is like my belly,
A round ship without rudder or prow.

I am a house of verse.
Twenty years of hunger built me up.
I sleep on a rag under an arch
on which two thousand verses are written
in two thousand languages.
In each language I am a daughter
and a sister. In all of them my cells split
and my head hammers when I drink too much wine.
A hundred sorrows sit at my side
and croon like old women then.
I cry out: but ‘the Muses
love deep silence’: and I
am like the child Solomon would split:
two feet, one head, a silence
that severs my belly:
each eave I lay down in silence,
I lay each tile, shingle,
I lay down the lintel in silence.
I am a house of verse
and in hunger I built myself up.

From the battle song of Thorlinda Haraldsdottir

‘I held at my side the glitterer.
Scratcher of men, daughter of fire
and the hammer, sister of tempering winds.
In my belly I held a piece of rage
thin as the moon, and it rolled there,
guttering. Then I took it up
and I opened my mouth. My tongue:
a coiled dragon
born on a windless sea.
I will call you to your grave with it.
Your soul is in your body like a boiled yolk
in a stuck egg, I will pierce it.
Your brow, a cliff’s cave, shelters you: I will shatter it
and I will not stain
my golden armlet.
Though your blood scald it,
my sword, raven-beak, burning
hair of a god, will not falter or cease.’