Even the crows
        have golden wings
        when flying in the sunset's light
                    From "Beyond" by Hans Borli

Hans Børli (December 8, 1918 – August 25, 1989) a Norwegian poet and writer from Eidskog, in South-Eastern Norway, close to the Swedish border. He was raised on a small farm, in the deep woods of Eastern Norway. His mother's father, himself one of the last great oral narrator of legends and stories of the area, Ole Gundersen Børli, is also considered an important influence on the young, writer to be.

A gifted boy, he was given a free place in Talhaug Mercantile School, in Kongsvinger which a he later left. He was later admitted to a military academy in Oslo, but this education was aborted by the outbreak of the Second World War. Børli fought the Germans, and was involved in some intense battles in Vardal, and was captured there. After his release, he went back to Eidskog and worked as a teacher and forest worker for the rest of the war. He was also involved in leading people across the Swedish border and safety for the remainder of the war. For most of his life he worked as a lumberjack and farmer.

 
Bust of Hans Børli on his farm site in Eidskog

Click on the thumbnails below for a larger image

View from his farm; Reading of his poetry by a local school teacher - July 2007

Starflowers, by Norway's Hans Borli (1918-1989)

There is no sky these nights
in early July, just an emptiness,
a pale absence
over the woods and bogs and t
he haze-blue fields
where the flowers blossom forlorn
in the shadow of the scythe's approaching time.
Tired of arching over
the mortals' paths in the dust,
the sky has in fact gone on holiday
and travelled far away,
to the azure coasts of eternity
where life is a ship on it's journey.
But it has committed the stars
to the moss's protection,
the moss in the woods
 -- the mildest and softest on earth.
I walk among star images,
walk like a little Lord
through galaxies
of shining whiteness. Somewhere
I stop with one foot lifted,
so I won't trample on the Pleiades,
    ~ From We Own the Forest and Other Poems: Hans Borli, translated by Louis Muinzer