Tonight Bjorn Brudberg of dVerse Poets Pub has offered the challenge of including this sequence – unaltered except perhaps by punctuation – from the poem ‘After Someone’s Death’ by the Swedish Nobel Laureate Tomas Tranströmer (1931-2015) in a prose offering of 144 words.

all of the names swallowed up by the cold

Here goes:


I don't know for how many further hours they questioned him, there in the slatted pine hut at the end of the one-way track. How many cigarettes they taunted him with, blowing fog and spume of empty shorelines around his patrician nose, against his exhausted thirsty skin, the ice tundra of his jaw. 

These days I can't dwell any longer on the price he paid on the Tree, by the time they had coaxed and ogled him for clues; riddled him for connections; mocked him for contacts.

They had obtained every single one, all of the names.

Swallowed up by the cold reality that slapped my face like sleet,  I gulped at the thin air inside the phone kiosk, and tried to blank out the image of his gargle-tortured face, the anguished twining of those familiar hands, the twist and swing of his feet.

© Kathy Labrum McVittie 11 March 2024