Sunday afternoon

The sky remained closed all day
and without much success we
invoked Satan. None of us knew
how, so to pass the time until
we could start drinking in earnest
we talked about people of old
and how they were crushed by
the elements, the planets in their
eternal orbits, the moon in its
orbit and the sun that rose time
and again, shining on us and then
setting again, each time at a different
time, boys we were, almost men.

Manual for cleaning a bunch of sprat

With a wooden handcart we brought
bales of wood shavings and sawdust to
the smokehouse where my uncles hung
herring and mackerel on skewers between
blackened brick walls over smouldering fires.

Herring swam in dense schools beyond the
Dogger Bank, mackerel closer to the coast.
Boats brought the catch ashore in wooden
barrels for further processing in the semi-dark
shadow realm that since disappeared like its ghosts.

Winter in Holland

Displaced trains, orphaned rails, travellers
lost, the despair of forgotten platforms,
drivers hibernate, gates frozen solid, ticket
machines of no further use, announcements
once announced fail to materialize, no one
can get a signal here, everything is snowed
over and wild animals play on abandoned
tracks throughout the whole of Holland.

After the storm

On the beach, the high-water mark,
Unrecognizable fragments connected
in a deathly grey tangle under a sky swept
clean. Seagulls. Some movement left in the
surf, remnants of storm and gusts of wind
extinguish in the white breaking of waves
as far as the eye can see skeletons of ships
thrown on the beach, sea monsters, shells,
carbide white as snow, planks eaten by
the salt seawater. Ship’s wood. Flotsam.

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.