Triin Paja
poetry
Triin Paja is an Estonian poet. She is the author of four collections of poetry in Estonian. Her awards include the Betti Alver Literary Award, the Juhan Liiv Prize for Poetry, and the Looming Poetry Award. Her English poetry has appeared in over sixty journals, among them Poetry Magazine, Ploughshares, and The Cincinnati Review. Her first chapbook, Sleeping in a Field (2025), won the Wolfson Poetry Chapbook Prize. Her second chapbook, Rivers, rivers, rivers, won the Sarabande Spring Chapbook Prize and is forthcoming in August 2026.
Sister in the Orchard
if the blighted tree is loved
then the gardener knows
when her child falls ill.
animals and trees
were all I mothered—
the eternal is very personal.
one summer, our pear tree fell ill.
as a child, my sister fell ill, over and over.
I envied the frail egret
of her fever—
the sick seemed so quiet, silvery, lyrical, far.
my sadness sang like a whale
when I dug up, then lit,
our pear.
the smoke of its wing bone branches
lifted. the sky, starched with the wind, darkened.
sister, nearer to Keats and Weil,
a damp field, a child-saint,
refusing
the buttered bread, mother’s strawberry jam—
under the dull cataracts
of the sky, I would have lit her.