The son and the sea

Often people think I'm a girl.
A sweet, shy girl.
I don't have to do anything for that.
Men want to safeguard me.

There was this rose grower. He put me in his bed.
He called his mother, I've got a girl now, he said.
Every day he went to his greenhouse.
He never took any roses back for me, they were all for export.
I wanted to go to the sea with him.
He took a day off and came along.

There are mothers who don't teach their sons how to swim.
I carried the rose grower into the surf,
and gave him to the sea.
The greenhouse I let be. I called his mother
and told her about her son and the sea.

Assignment 

Do you still write my dear? my mother asked me.
You used to write beautiful poetry and stories.
I wonder: in what kind of world we are living in...
Do you want some more tea? I mean: all that trite,
they write about things for which there are no words.
She looked up at me. I don't understand why people are drowning  themselves in the maelstrom of this time. - come on dear, do something about it. Especially you. 
You are capable to create something of value for this life,
with as incentive the word of the Lord that is given to us?

She looked at me. She was grabbing her last chance:
Something to laugh about then, maybe. She smiled.

February

You can not sit closer 
to the window. In another house

white balloons are blown 
through the room and a hand
is already laying out 
the knifes. Who enters now

will find empty plates, under the
table a child is drawing 
a smile on the sun.

We're arriving somewhere tonight,
to a party or a bed where 
a body is missing. Alongside the canal

a father is cycling with his son 
in the little front seat. In his left hand
he holds the head that thinks he's a pillow.

Inside a girl of twelve years is waiting.
Maybe she's waiting to be taken home

but most of all she's waiting for snow.

Coincidence

Winter in Pompeii. A time of 
sweeping, cleaning up, restoration
and digging further in the ash.
Students have been deployed,
sometimes a picture is taken.

Six years pass, and in your tent
at three in the morning you show me pictures:
Look, I was a student then, 
we dug up a villa in Pompeii, 
It was cold as hell, I stole this coin, here!

A couple of years later I leaf through
a catalog about Pompeii. With a shock
I recognize the picture, your thick sweater, your knit cap,
It was cold as hell you said.
Slowly I slide the cold coin over my warm chest.

Greenhouse effect

I fell for the pink and the cloud
of pure warmth that arose
with the evaporation of the embrace
that happened under your blankets.

Up to where the tips were, 
over the edges of your bed
to the window-panes
circled the scent of freshly-baked

desire. Even in the fall
when the drought had passed
and your ability to observe

declined, my skin was inhaling
the question to enlightenment 
and the corners of your room.

Beach combing


The good old times of my parents
have become a transparent
I love you on yellowed paper.
Dull shades, a wrong angle
the signs of a future
and the lighting that failed.

Here on this page 
they are still living in 
discotheques of countries
now ravaged by war.
Something nobody would have 
suspected then.
The wind was favorable and the sea
pulverized fear into shell-sand.

Feather Island

She stacks four packages of cigarettes 
loosely on top of each other. 
A suitcase like a rocky island, girls

too tanned and so blonde 
their hair. Before we go

something blows through the
glassless window of what is
calling itself a hotel.

Do we have everything?

She says that the soul of a dead person
can return as a butterfly.
She closes the zipper under her legs.

On the platform of a previous town
a women in a winter coat
asks from what direction the train to Tallinn 

will come, while a horde of people is looking to the east.

I zoom in and again
don't take a picture of myself.