Maar in zijn rand verbrak de zee in reven
—Herman Gorter, ‘Mei’

but the sea crumbled at its edges like reef cakes
endless as heartbeat bombs repeating overhead
yellow bees (or were they drones? blue clouds?
thousands of them, mouthing stuff about wars
the sweaty children’s armpits in Ukraine (same
as here: lipsticked girls lined up at a kermis, their
necklaces made from shells found out on Schier;
flowers in hair or the ozone haze of deo—green-
and-white striped fatbikes, blue-lead eyeshadow,
nail-polish the colour of an evening in Dokkum.
The zweefmolen screeched its Frisian maladies,
rusted as the waves that wandered out of the sea,
a cleaner rush than anything from the Kruidvat,
humid vowels bright with glass pebbles, bonkers
and the klang of metal on the whispered winds.
And the dunes, faraway, remain faintly audible,
even in Hoek van Holland, which is ages away:
tho it’s hardly beautiful, or so I am often told—
nothing like the precious Waddenzee melodies
that stomp and suckle and sing inside the mud,
more wondrous even than human consonants,
calling us to the sky and seas—simultaneously.

Note: This is the fourth stanza of my reimagining of Herman Gorter’s poem, ‘Mei’ [May], which was first published in Dutch in 1889.