Friday Echidne Thoughts

This blog is still the gateway drug to feminism, the bowl of dry-scientific-granola-with-a-sprinkling of cyanide and I'm still worse than a thousand Hitlers and far too much a goody-two-shoes.

Whether there's any usefulness in that I don't know.  But as long as I have some fun!

This mood is linked to one of my favorite Finnish poems, by Aaro Hellaakoski, Hauen Laulu (The Pike's Song).  It's wonderful in Finnish but not really translatable, at least by me.  The gist, in English:

From its wet home
the pike climbed the tree
to sing

When through the gray clouds
the rising sun glimmered
and on the lake woke up
the laughing wavelets, to race

Rose the pike to the top of the spruce tree
to bite on the red cone

It may have heard or smelled
or tasted the end of the cone
all dew-wet from the morning ---
such unspeakable greatness

when opening wide
its bony mouth
clicking
its giant jaw bone

such a wild-heavy a psalm it sang
that the birds went silent
as if the weight of the waters
had swept over
and the cold lap of loneliness.