The Guns of Soumenlinna

Take the ferry to Sveaborg,

which is what the Swedes called

what the Finns would call Soumenlinna,

by which they meant the Castle of Finnland

 

a UNESCO World Heritage Site,

as a very much admired example of a fortress

 

Which, like all admirable defenses,

turns out to be inadequate:

The Great Wall

The Maginot Line

Sveaborg / Soumenlinna . . . .

 

The Russians simply bypassed it in 1808,

and took Helsinki,

THEN laid siege from the Mainland . . .

 

Now it is a picnic park,

and a place for weddings or wedding pictures

 

land from the ferry,

buy bottles of water

and walk the gravel path

to the other end of the island(s).

 

There,

stand face-in-the-wind

on the sandy dunes

bulwarked with stone and granite

and imagine the star-shaped battlements

bristling with cannon

commanding the harbour

 

It seems plausible . . .

 

It seems formidable  . . .

 

But it wasn’t.

 

Now

the cannons are plugged or spiked

tho’ you can still run your hands inside

to feel the rifling

 

they lie idle, undone

oxidizing. . .

 

I think it would be good sport,

once a year, in a ceremony,

to fire one of the guns

like a drill for the admiralty

to demonstrate lethality

 

all-the-while reflecting

that while it is all so obsolete

in the face of modern war,

that it was so ineffective

in its own time