Reclining here at harbour-edge,
awash with gulls
and American tourists,
as I await the ferry
this island across the thin stretch
of the Baltic sea looks a paradise.
Green, well-wooded and well-spired
it glitters like aj ewel in the September sun.
Every island is a paradise
until you end up as one.

Abandoned by the gulls we land at Viapori,
Sveaborg, Suoinenlinna, call it what you will.
All the names roll well along the tongue.
The sun is still warm against the skin
though a biggish cloud is darkening to the south.
I go through a museum, traverse a bridge
and come up against children
sliding down a cannon.
Climbing a shoulder of rock I find
the coast littered with them, cannon
after cannon trained against the sea.

They lived here, soldiers, eight thousand of them,
idling away and gambling maybe,
picking up pine-cones for their samovars,
spray in their faces, salt in their eyes,
looking out for the enemy.
A century of waiting
as the hourglass fills and the field-glass hazes.
A century gone, looking for mast and sail
upon a wave-crest,
and a Viking beard or a pirate eye-patch.

What were these cast-iron cannons waiting for?
The Russian or the Swedish foe?
Trained against the sky, our own missiles
will appear as silly to a tranquil future
that may descend upon the planet.
The squall gathers and scatters ruminations.
Sallboats scurry back, fishermen return
as we race through bastion and entrenchment
and climb on to the ferry, cold and dripping.
Tourist groups shiver and joke, shiver and laugh.
I feel a bead of moisture move across
the rosary of my spine, but I sit still.
If no one sees me laugh
he will not see me squirm either.

A beach, people sunning themselves,
children building sand-houses-that's no island.
Battlements on the coast, trained cannon,
a sentry tower, that's an island.
So that nothing can come in
so that nothing can go out.