‘May.be’ 1

Een nieuwe lente en een nieuw geluid . . .
–Herman Gorter, ‘Mei’

another spring so brand-new it made the novel feel old
if only a poem could mimic a day, or a season’s whistle
(that we heard on the building site, one summer night
in a crumbling city, its canals long gone or covered over
if we ever really lived in such a place (yes, dark and still 
despite the golden hour (the children played outside in 
the cold, late light and the vistas of barns and meadows 
the jigsaw puzzles of village houses through a window—
i’d hear it once again: the old kibbeling truck’s melody
or the horrible hack of a neighbour clearing his throat
as children brought home birthday candy from school
and spring’s wet rain pushed the blue door wide open
while little boys wandered the lanes, urinated on walls
playing with water pistols or searching for salamanders
and we listened for blackbirds and wrens on the phone 
if only to calm ourselves down before nestling into bed
while faraway some old bloke called out a name in vain
but suddenly there was no time to read stories (again—
it’s just a moment, when you reach to close a window
for him, already asleep: his whistled snore a flute, 

                                        a reed. 

Notes:

Kibbeling (NL): fried fish

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