Craft

I should have learned a craft. A trade. Making
or repairing things when they are broken. Doffing
my cap on the street for the doctor and the notary.
A modest working-class home with a glowing

potbelly stove. Marry the fishmonger’s daughter.
Cars don’t want to drive anymore. Just give me
a moment. I open the hood and take a look at
the engine. Oil. Fat. Tire pressure. Wipe a dipstick

in the crankcase with an old rag. Wood. Screws.
Nails. Saw. Plane. Toolbox. Maybe something
with electrical engineering. Troubleshooting.

Short circuit. Switches. Click twice and the light
will come on again. No, no thanks needed. It
was nothing, really. Now it’s too late for all that.

Night on the threshold of east and west

Gently passing over the river the throbbing
of two-stroke diesel engines, locomotives
drag rumbling goods trains across the bridge
and waiting for the painkillers to kick in I
listen to secret signals from migrating birds
keeping contact high up in the night sky
on the threshold between east and west.

Not going to church

A merciful God plunges my world into safe
shades of grey, behind this mist is nothing,
everything is gone, ditches disappear in grey
nothingness, the green of meadows grey, roads

grey, villages, beasts, women. We put off going
to church because we can’t find it, the church and
the world are gone, we retreat to the safety of the
crypt, draw the mist like a warm grey blanket over

our innocent nudity and listen silently to the secret
language of our togetherness, eat each other’s flesh
and drink our salty nectar, take root in the grey earth
and enter into the greyness of our amniotic fluid, grey

as the night and the day that follows it, and the days
and grey nights, when unseen planets roam across
the sky, grey as the grey days and the grey moon,

grey wool keeps us warm in the thick grey fog, grey
grease fuses us in the grey world where nothing is
left but our bodies and the all surrounding greyness.

Saturday amateurs

Hoar frost covers bare branches
around frosted fields, birds fall
from the sky like plagues as we
walk across the frozen ground
to the white expanse at the edge
of our own frozen penalty box.

Snow in January

Barely visible a white blanket covering
the land, a single weightless flake swirls
earthward, we see snow accumulating into
metre-high dunes into which trains run aground,
a layer of thick ice on rivers and lakes, professional
speed skaters’ thighs, farmers block supermarket
distribution centres with their tractors, flashing
lights tear up the night. Snow falls in January,
spring awaits in the ground, bulbous plants,
trees bud, sheep lamb, the newsreader’s
voice fades and extinguishes in the cold.

Enno de Witt is a published Dutch author and poet, an artist and musician, webmaster and editor. For him, writing poetry is a sheer necessity, like breathing, sleeping, drinking and eating. His poetry is founded on the bedrock of the classics, Dutch as well as international, and revolves around the Eternal Questions, often using imagery pertaining to his younger years, growing up on the seashore amongst wild heretics.

You can find more of Enno’s work here on Ink Pantry.