Thank you.
Is it really possible that I have been here
four times or three times before?
Mhm.
We see you.
You see me getting older and older.
Is it somebody who was present here last year--
no, two years ago, when I was here last time.
He was here.
Well, not too many, because I'm afraid
you will hear some poems again which I had at that time.
Let me start with one of them.
It's a poem called "The Forgotten Captain".
And it's about a distant relative of mine
who was a sea captain during World War II in the Merchant
Fleet and was trapped outside the neutral Sweden.
And he was on a ship that went in convoys
between Canada and England.
And he-- it was a rather hard job.
And he died from a violent ulcer when
he was in Cardiff, in England between two of those convoy
trips.
And he is very--
I didn't think about him for many, many years
until one evening a couple of years ago,
when I took a solitary walk in my island,
in the archipelago east of Stockholm.
And this fellow suddenly became very much alive to me.
I hadn't thought about him since I was a child.
And when I came home to my house,
I found a photograph from the beginning of the century
where here he is as a little boy,
standing with a sailing boat in his arms,
together with some other boys.
So it's a completely documentary poem, this one.
"The Forgotten Captain".
"We have many shadows.
I was walking home in the September night
when Y climbed up out of his grave after 40 years
and kept me company.
At first, he was quite empty, only a name.
But his thoughts swam faster than time ran and caught up
with us.
I put his eyes to my eyes and saw war's ocean.
The last boat he captained took shape beneath us.
Ahead, in the stern, the Atlantic convoy
crept, those that would survive and those that
bore the mark invisible to all.
While sleepless days relieved each other but never him,
under his oilskin, his life jacket.
He never came home.
It was an internal weeping that led him
to death in a Cardiff hospital.
He could at last lie down and turn into the horizon.
Goodbye, eleven-knot convoys.
Goodbye, 1940.
Here ends world history.
The bombers were left hanging.
The heathery moors blossomed.
A photo from early this century shows
a beach, six Sunday-best boys, sailing boats in their arms.
What solemn airs.
The boats that became life and death for some of them.
And writing about the dead, that, too, is a game
made heavy with what is to come."