As we drove the countryside we came on sign after sign indicating a tragedy had happened in one place or another, mass graves where a village burned to the ground, murders unspeakable, concrete bunkers old enough to have become part of the landscape. Several months ago, my wife Daiva and I traveled to her family’s homeland in Lithuania, where she’s been returning since she was a teenager when the country was still under Soviet occupation. Time would come to a halt.Īll the generations would stop and listen. Just one word for the crowds and for the nations. As war rose around her, the poems became dark with premonitions as, Laima wrote, “she wished she could bring the world back to its senses.” Less than a year before she was murdered and buried in an unmarked weedy peat bog, Matilda wrote: Otherwise, they would have easily disappeared, and the young poet’s name would be lost. Matilda Olkinaitė’s journals and poems were hidden in a church and hardly seen by anyone until they were unpacked from a dresser and shown to Laima in 2017.

Laima translated the young woman’s work into a beautiful book, including reproductions of journal pages revealing a swooning love life complete with teenage heartbreak, ink on two of the pages dotted with three drops of tears. My wife’s childhood friend, awarded author and translator of Lithuanian poetry Laima Vince, stood on our wooden deck discussing a Jewish poet who was executed along with her family at the age of 19 in 1941 outside of the small Lithuanian town where they lived. Under a spring sky in the high desert of Western Colorado, we had a little gathering at our house.

Three sunsets and other poems