‘May.be’ 2

Zóó . . .
[Soooo . . . ]

–Herman Gorter, ‘Mei’

i will sing it for you when we get back from forever
it sounds just like the song we used to sing together: 
if you polish my language or buttered up my accent
I would teach your left eye to wink when you laugh 
but whose hand could that be in the shallow duvet—
whose sunburnt driver’s arm there on the other side
of the mist (heartbreaking cries of calves in polders
sprayed with stikstof burning deep inside our throats
domes of a biogas plant, trucked in behind the oaks 
sprouting new stems—like ten shots of jonge jenever
on a terrace: spring’s clinking sounds (or a mouthfeel
while generals talk (and the buses turn blue and gold 
we reverse our old-age plans (dream a new front gate

Notes:

Stikstof (NL): Nitrogen
Jonge jenever (NL): Dutch gin

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