Woodland.

Woodland. Photographs by Mårten Lange. Farewell Books, Göteborg, 2008. 42 pp., Numerous black & white illustrations., 6x7½".

"When my door is shut and my lamp has gone out

and I sit in twilight's breathing wrapped,

then I feel around me move

branches, a tree's branches.
In my room where no one else lives

the tree spreads a shadow as soft as gauze.

It lives silent, it grows well,

it becomes what some unknown one thinks.
Some spirit-power, power secret made,

in the trees' hidden roots its will has laid.

I am frightened sometimes and ask in fear:

Are we so surely friends?
But it lives in calm and it grows still,

and I know not where it strives and whither it will.

It is sweet and bewitching to live so near

one whom one does not know..."

Karin Boye: The Tree (translation into English by David McDuff).