Toen werd de zee wel als een groot zwaar man . . .
[Then the sea became like a big, heavy man . . . ]

– Herman Gorter: Mei. Een gedicht. 1889.

I was a great big man bursting out of the sea,
dressed in my expensive olden-days bathers.
“This is my country!” I roared, my brown arms
filled with stunned silver fish (while, faraway, 
the Russian drones took notes, playing dead. 
The locals lit bonfires just to keep me warm 
but kept all their hoses running, just in case
I, broad-shouldered, caught fire or flew away. 

Notes:

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