From colleague to colleague
I rebound, sticking to them
like silly putty for a while

Impetuously, our blood flows
with attention for each other
with a little gesture
of very best wishes, fare on
well in ebb and adversity!

I'm leaving because it has to be
yet it is good for me
this sour-sweet greeting
of giving goodbye
etcetera

With Maria and Karin in Blixembosch
love flows
between the words and thoughts

We do not hold each other's hands
and do not close our eyes
but we try

to understand it better
to be able to explain it better
to students and ourselves

Whatever love is, I feel it

between us, I am, we are
complete, open, we are
not interfering with ourselves

and the love among us
is not ours
it flows

I survived
and write it down
to forget it

I don't have to remember
what I can read over, but I have to
look for the words

that hide, anxious words
as if my pen is the knife
under the highway past our house

put out of nowhere on my throat
The evening had already fallen
Nervously he cried for money

a beginner, his plan
could be smoothened with calmness
my fear sabotaged

by my husband: 'We don't have money
what use are tea and caramel fudges?'
'Í have money! In my bag'

'Give, give!' My husband
quietly takes my purse
and opens it upside down

The coins fall
The boy bends down
Hand in hand we run

The half-stone of friendship remains
even if you are complete without me
and it is true

what a wise friend read
in the lines of your hand

even if you would never
think of me again

The eternal is a thought
felt or thought in me
– knowing

to exist only for a while
to possess only for a while
– knowing

that being and having is living
half, and being and giving
is love

– people
who give space
and sweet fruits

– people
who give, people
who give each other to be

Hop, step and jump into the tram
long paces left right through the gangway
to the platform in the rear
there, my thoughts choose their own track


Who would not want to


do all one would want to


do if one could?


Bringing love generously
in the air, on land and at sea
rescuing people out of stormy weather

no abroad, being at home in every land
running through the breakers and the sand
and laughing a lot together

sunsummers without a plan or decision
just a warm wind, just the soft skin
of an initially unknown lover

It is dark
a wall at the left side
the ditch at the right
and far away
I hear mopeds looming up
at the end of the path
catching me
in their light
the sound becomes loud

my pounding heart presses itself
close against the wall
a minute and it will be over

They stop

Boys look past
my shyness
I don't understand

So beautiful I see my feelings
in my face, my forms
in the mirror

Why doesn't anyone
want to enjoy me?
The beauty of a boy

discovered inside and out
by my skin
my curious body

In other people's houses
I capture the beds
in my dreams

None of them invite me
Can they see in me
how critical I am?

We eat a fresh caught crab fish
in the setting sun and as in the old books
of my mother we count the ticking
of the clock from time tot time
you say old books also are okay

Another carrot and a pun
once more delaying
the unavoidable farewell kiss
no more calling on each other
I really don't know what to say

Separate rules apply for my parents
but increasingly exposed was the faith
of the other adults

braided over the centuries
from examples how people should take care
Cain the first

then books full of theology
and science why
we violate what is good

for us. Saints are no help
nor serious faces in the light
of the candles burning for them

nor angels watching over us
nor holiness on the tongue, swallowed
carefully with my very best intentions

for all my brothers and sisters
God is far away in heaven
not omnipresent on earth

     his spirit by my side
     and inspiring as a friend
     in the depths of my mind

but entered into the elders
who hypocritically preach to each other
about the devil in the other

Collages of 1970
I draw from reality
and fantasize it

I'm exploring my faces
on pictures and in real life
I usually find myself more beautiful

The divine body
of youth, says my aunt
not Morris's naked ape

But nobody notices
whatever clothes I take off
in my chaste longing

for sex, never thought
of nude butts without sluts
armpit hair and scent signals

all those certainties
that I do not experience
As if I'm still a child

Which is beyond
words, is present here
in the twilight, the secret

not to know yet
how it will continue
but to feel the net

coming together in me –
invisible connections
to the heartbeats of life

In wordless language
the breathing of the pipes
conquers space from the silence

in gently waves and then by itself
nothingness has become music –
new webs of finethreads

between sense cores
of souls once and somewhere
in confluent time

Sometimes everything is open and
the wind rushes out of the chest
downbelow into the empty space

of the ship, vibrating
between the pews and around
the altar, the air is alive
in the sacred semi-darkness

My consciousness expands
lets thoughts float on exercises
and improvisations to arrange them
and let them land in their place
during the lunch break in the chapel

My teens, the sixties
of the century, meditating
in the sacred semi-darkness
of the organ of eternity

I do remember my birth
but without information leaflet
because I didn't know any words

only experiences and associations
of experiences with experiences
and as a teenager I often dreamed

to crawl up from a cave
in the ground: light at the end
of the tunnel, which becomes narrower

clutching me and making me afraid
of fainting and suffocating
I can't move forward, not back

but back then I made it
so I don't give up now
although I don't dare to go to sleep

Bruises on my hips
from a growth spurt, long days
of practising my brains
and always cycling against the wind
in the winter over polder ice

A doctor's prescription
with jealous eyes of my sisters
who also want to eat sweet
cream every day, but then
they'd have to grow faster

make long days of practising their brains
and always cycle against the wind
in the winter over polder ice
(for their future, for themselves –
  the party will be later)

It's another neighbourhood
no longer a theater in the backyard
but homework

with term results and world-
literature in the wall cabinet
There, I live many lives

inside, in the stories
music rooms and museum halls
that expand on subscription

in the palace of my brain
I want to discover all secrets
know the ever singing woods

through and through
receive the gift of discretion
and be happy with it

experience how to live with everything
I know, because I know
well that love is everything

Every morning after the reveille
we hold a bicycle race
from the camp to the Meuse

At full speed I take
the last turn, right
into brand new barbed wire

invisible in the light of the sun
As proficient torturers two others
are colliding with me immediately

Flat tire, torn clothes
In a comic strip, I would be
hanging horizontally now

But I fall, rips in my flesh
gaping and bleeding
Bandages at breakfast

and then I lead my patrol again, what else
after the inscrutable providence
of a farmer who's going to pasture on the river?

Getting up at six o'clock for swimming
lessons in the mountain lake, in autumn
with fog and rain, then breakfast

clocking my time on arrival at school
and wanting to win the run
around the sports fields, as if

it brings me any points
for what I am worth
relying on the lesson

that I do it all for myself
because the great ideals
of the adults are too good

for their worries
I hear their words and their deeds
make me think

so I knew it already

In those days the soul of a child
still was something to wash
off vices and to leave school

clean as Our Sweet Lord
with nothing but love
to start puberty

A beautiful ideal, to give
my life for people and
heaven and peace on earth

Willing to sacrifice me
I lay unprotected as a lamb
in the blue open air

in a bed of frisky grass
without fleeing the blot
of the eagle falling over me

striking his claws in my tender flesh
and taking me bleeding
to blissful heights

I was drifting along
too long roads through Stepmoor
tired and alone

There was a shorter path
home, I knew that
for certain as a scout

but two too large boys
of the farm kicked me
back, the city child in uniform

and threatened with the dog
It already was getting dark
nobody saw me

nobody to help me
I was tired and alone
in my sadness

Throngs of believers flown here
walk quietly through the narrow streets
of the old city to deepen the old story

from their eyes and their soles
to their guilty souls
that cannot grasp it

There are even more on the other side
of the world in a colourful field
full of parasols at the holes in the ground

to watch the arrival
of the Roman soldiers
April 14^th, 2017. Jerusalem. Pampanga.

Fifty-five years ago, three days after
my tenth birthday, I walked to the room
just past the Swampstead Road

where a man with nails
through his hands and feet
was hanging skinny on the cross

It was not crowded, slowly
I shuffled along in a thin row
past the real holes

There was nothing to say about it
there was only that old story
and it didn't come any closer

maybe it did for that man
maybe not
because it wasn't his first time

For months I was afraid
to go to bed, afraid
of the nightmares of the army

of bees with their big bulging eyes
they buzzed to me from all sides
and kept hanging in front of my face

I screamed: mum, dad
It woke me up, but
they didn't come, I was alone

At school I made mistakes
I'd rather not get a turn
Always I had been the best

but now I started to hesitate
and again my answer was wrong
The teacher called me forward

and then I did know the result
and he that this was not a mystery
but eyes become near-sighted

With cursive handwriting, sums and stories
I am exploring the world, six days a week
on a folding table with an ink jar

and at home with Jules Verne
games and fantasy, frost flowers
on the window and a hot water bottle in bed

A quarrel now and then, but peace
on earth and for later the task
of contributing to it, like dad

In the morning we deliver in pyjamas
with empty cans on large trailers
portable gas tanks, and bulk tanks

throughout the country
between the beds. We learn how
to do it, first the crafts

no more than eleven, and then the success
of which everyone becomes better
It's all not so difficult

when you're young. And willing
And don't yet know a great many
And the main issues are sufficient, as for dad

Good and evil, the angels
and devils who whisper
behind me to guide me

or seduce me, beautifully
drawn in the picture book
that allured my children's soul

With not too many stains
on my soul, I could hope
for purgatory

but I'd rather want to be good
It seemed sensible to me
to know what is right and wrong

in my thoughts, words and deeds
on earth, between heaven and hell

Mum is beautiful, and the garage
with my own name on it
which I can not read yet
and my bike on Queen's Day

the flower garlands on the cars
after a day at the seaside
with all the cousins

everything I make
and break down again, cranes
buildings and drawings

Mum says: you live
on Mount Olympus
because you are very special
and make everything beautiful

The people who nodded
yes, that's you, those cheeks
that smiling face

in my baby photo album
those people are dead, and I
don't know anything about it

I remember the signboards
the superscriptions that I wanted to read
my eyes took pictures

that nobody else will ever see

the locks of hair on the slippery tiles
at the barber in Hesperen Street
tapping lotion into my skin

the two chestnut trees in the yard
of the kindergarten and the children
who want to sail across in the playtime

the marvel of the beechnuts
swirling down in the Wedding Avenue
(funny that there is no church there)

Handfuls of nuts I took with me
my memory has pictures of it
which I will not forget