How to come to love your Latvia?
I take it and place it in my palm,
And feel, tickling my hand,
The Venta, the Daugava, the Gauja flowing.
How to come to love your Latvia?
I press my face to the earth’s cheek
As to a mother, a daughter, a friend.
And I feel upon my own cheek
The homeland’s forests growing.
How to come to love your Latvia?
I hold, asking, cheek against cheek,
And feel, flowing over the land,
A tear, salty and bitter.
And suddenly it confounds me, –
Whether it is mine or Latvia’s sea.
( Rudīte Losāne
from the poetry collection
“In God’s Tear” )
I will carry you within me,
Latvia,
Like a tear,
That will rise upward
From the sea of my tears.
I will carry you within me,
Latvia,
Like a summer,
Like a dread summer,
That will long be bitter within me.
I will carry you within me,
Latvia,
As sons carry flowers
To their mother on a feast day, –
So solemnly and nobly.
Carry me within you,
Latvia,
As the flesh of a mussel
Carries a grain of sand,
That I may become a part of you,
A part of your portion.
( Rudīte Losāne,
17.02.2012)
Behold how heroes grow,
In this fragile little land
Where pines drive their roots slowly
Into soil hard and dry.
Behold how heroes ripen
In a row with bulrush maces
When boys run to cut whistles
In the long and grey grass.
Behold how heroes rise
Upright from their father’s home
Standing firm like a stone wall
For their frail little land.
Behold how the little land arises
Together with the heroes, contented,
And goes forth along the broad road
Out into the world, protected.
(Rudīte Losāne
from the poetry collection
“The Salty Honey”.)