What Rembrandt said to Hendrickje
That is mountain blue, he said,
the most precious colour.
It is transported along distant routes
and must be kept for the moments
when the valley beside your temple turns blue.
I am not well-off enough to use it often,
but then I do it anyway:
lapis lazuli grounded on the stone slab.
What is to become of us?
Den dyrbaraste färgen (Black Island Books, 2022)
Travel with you
I would like to travel with you
to the bottom of the sea, a sunken city
outside Alexandria, and the water is
green-layered over broken pillars,
almost like the palm-trees in Antoniades Garden.
Perhaps it is a heathen temple yard.
Remains of wrecks, thwart and hull
washed in innocence.
And submarines play music behind
window panes, seaweed blend the tones.
On occasion divers arrive,
taking pictures and samples,
and a surprised caryatid
turns meeting a frog-like
cyclops gaze, the dress folding deeply
and the headlocks gather
curling shades, watching one another
from different worlds, in an unexpected
caesura among the corals.
A ray flies past …
Why would we be awakened?
We would swing in that melody,
salter and heavier than any
manual of ars amandi.
Sulamits bekännelser (Lejd, 2023)
The rest is skin
From the darkness of my fate I strew my words,
among the cedar pillars in the porch.
Poetry is: I give you my soul.
The rest is skin.
I am black, burned by storm.
With my darkness I touch you.
I know you love me
for the sake of my black neck,
raised like a pillar over the Luxor temple.
Exegetes will measure the temperature of our voices,
raising and falling below the surface.
Perhaps we let each other down,
but I kept my script of darkness.
Can you see me dance along the line of sphinxes
with my rustling necklace of scarabs?
Sulamits bekännelser (Lejd, 2023)
My body is my avowal
I didn't prayed with the faithful
in their churches and chapels.
No icon guards my steps,
no priest hears my song.
I am here, I remain.
My body is my avowal, my days
are my hoarse call to the Risen one.
The Christians sing around the altars,
my struggle and my joy are theirs.
In a cascade of water, my life is drawn,
incessantly poured,
over my burning head.
I am the godchild of the Nazarene,
whom He brought from captivity
out into the desert.
Maria av Egypten (Black Island Books, 2021)
Marie Tonkin is a Swedish-British poet. During the last years she has published five books of poems, receiving broad critical acclaim; the latest being Lili Marlene (Lejd, 2025). Marie Tonkin has also translated poetry, for example by Else Lasker-Schüler, Alda Merini and Sarah Kirsch.
Marie Tonkin has received a prize from De Nios Samfund and a scholarship from the Swedish Academy. Her book Sulamits bekännelser was nominated to Svenska Dagbladets literary prize 2024.
Below are her poems in English translation.
Farewell to the Moirai
One day I, a person with my handbag full of
red robins hibernating like
flames from some story, turned away
from the heliophobic goddesses of fate,
the shuttle coming to a halt, changing laps;
colours: the golden scissors, their never trembling
hands – and looked into your very dark, completely
human, from far away eyes.
Lili Marlene (Lejd, 2025)
Since he disappeared with the mermaid in Zennor
And so they swam along.
It was high tide, the sun blazed overconfidently,
the waves green against his hair like mustard,
the pheasants screeched and her fish tail cleaved
our expectations and our wonder.
No one has seen them since.
Of other people’s choices not much can be done.
They both had such beautiful voices.
The foreign woman who appeared at mass,
no one knew wherefrom,
and he, Matthew Trewella.
Thus closes the old legend.
I followed the mermaid’s relievo in a carved chair.
Matthew received new life down in the sea.
He came from our little village.
But to me he wasn’t
the fine voice in the choir every Sunday,
he was my brother.
(Unpublished poem)
On Aswan's market street
In dusks of silk I met Aladdin,
the neon lighting screeched along
the souvenir shops, and he carried
a roll of rags over his shoulder.
One evening I stopped the centuries.
His eyes of amber had travelled
over the desert line and back,
and he didn’t ask if I wanted
to buy a carpet, for they weren’t for sale.
But if you like, he said, I’ll give you one –
and the carpets unfolded like red dragon tongues
or shining pelts of extinct animals.
Handmade, he said, by a queen
in a distant land, to be stretched
between the clefts in time
when it breaks.
Sulamits bekännelser (Lejd, 2023)