Imagine the night

How to express what I feel for you: I
only have words in a language not mine
but in my dreams you appear in silence.

Nights are better when with you. Even awake.
I feel your shiver going down my spine:
attached, bonded, (please don’t call us soul mates.)

When I sleep, all seems to be right with us.
My vocabulary sucks but it’s fine.
Let’s sleep and be together in our dreams.

Imagine the night. Every movement ours.
We stay in bed together till it’s nine
and nothing is the way it should, or seams.

Losing it

I sit near a crow and think what it must be like
to have wings, to leave gravity for what it is,
to fly over sea and land and sea again:
it would mean excitement to me, a dream,
but for the bird it seems not out of the ordinary.

We look at each other, creature to creature,
depending both on food and water,
mortal, fragile, and a lot of what we have in pairs:
two eyes, two legs, so much alike we are
in most important matters.

The crow may read my human mind,
and wonders why I don’t use my arms to fly.
I show him how I try, I flutter,
moving arms quickly up and down
with no result.

The crow beside me laughs and flies away,
only to return with two companions.
‘Watch that human,’ I can hear him say.
‘She has wings like dead tree branches.’
Inadequate I stand corrected by some birds.

The noise of a helicopter right above us
suddenly scares them away into the woods
making me feel triumphant
though I know I have lost it today
in more ways than one.

😉

Testers

The warm Summer air smelled of cinnamon, honeysuckle;
you of travel and sea, tobacco.
Years later they made a fragrance like that,
and sold it in small bottled portions.

They want too much money
for a fading memory, a sense
that is well overdue, but
each time I pass those testers,
in shops between the scents of sweet chemical flowers
– pinkish, or the musky kind –
I spray a bit of long time gone in my hair, my neck,
going for free illusions of you. My mind
can’t tell the difference;
when I close my eyes, all is true.

If I get a chance, if no one is watching,
more is misting down my skin,
to find you back, retrieving those nights
we secretly claimed as ours.

Peace

A lot goes on elsewhere but here is silence;
no harassment will take place when I’m alone
and rain can fall without disturbing peace.
I could pretend no other lives in the whole universe.

Somewhere you are around me though.
It seems that distance doesn’t matter now.
A lot goes on that I am not aware of,
so often I don’t understand the why and how.

One day this Earth is dead. We humans kill
whatever we can kill, we are that breed
and always will be so. In Syria they know.
But here I can pretend the world is good.

I watched the full moon shine over the water.
So quiet can it be. Deceivingly at ease.
There is no peace but when I am alone
why not pretend for just a moment that there is.

For

For those who went
with no return
let’s burn a candle
share a memory
a thought

For those who went
will always stay
let’s think this way
as every candle
loves them

Forever thoughts
return to us
in candle light
in memories
relived.

I made the photo yesterday, Terschelling harbour pier

Shadow

A lonesome figure near the shoreline,
your shadow drifted over the water
after your last words were gone,
after the tide washed the beach
rinsing memories we had to let go of.

Nothing remains to hold on to,
hear, silence falls over the waves
and water slips through my fingers.
Now and then the sea whispers
of days we could have been together.

I see your silhouette every time
I am there. I feel your presence,
as if you are walking beside me
but none of it is real now. Those days
are shadows moving fast away from land.

Outnumbered

Lying in bed on my side
I push the world back for a little longer.
Thoughts flutter and return to silence.
I want no part of what is turning around
beneath my head. Beyond my sleep.
I’m slumbered.

But with the curtain moving,
sun spreading yellow on the wall,
the smell of coffee, thoughts of you
that slip in secretly by songs of birds,
I roll over and give in to another day.
Outnumbered.

😉

The reed you are

The reed stands
caught in a flight
halfway to freedom,
stranded in a swamp,
making the best of life.

Waiting in meanwhiles,
like you wait for returning
to the land you have left,
bending waves in all directions,
serf to the ruling wind.

Dreams of what lies beyond
make you whisper at nights,
rooting against all odds.
While the land means memory.
While the swamp slowly wins.

Shelley

It was over between us, and a thunderstorm came.
Books fell down from the shelf for no reason
like domino stones as the grave stones they were,
and my thoughts went with them below,
taking all that was you, they went falling, deep
into the earth taking you. Gone as our love in a blow.

But the wind started turning the pages
of the Shelley I once got from you.
It had to mean something important:
we read it together, lying in grass.
I did not want to look but started reading:
“Alas! This is not what I thought life was.”

Kitschy moments

When my mother lost her life,
many years before her death
I could not cope well
and I cried in the garden,
as she did in the nursing home.
Never were we both so alone.
Then a butterfly landed on my hand,
I remember I thought it a kitschy moment.

It stayed there till my tears were over.
When I finally returned
to my mother, days later, she
who had never done any drawing,
drew what to me looked like a butterfly
on the steamed window.
She said it was a handkerchief
and I agreed. But it was a butterfly.

From then on, in other kitschy moments,
in leaps of time, in hidden meanings,
if I looked beyond, I found answers.
Now and then we understood
that words could move silently between us
like our thoughts. Her eyes spoke for her.
She had forgotten me,
but her body knew I was the child she carried.