Hester Knibbe
​
Translated by Vivien D. Glass

Yes

Love, yes there is always a body involved
which makes it and makes it, makes it


tricky at times. Doesn’t matter though, we've been
together for so long that we've internalised
each other, can't get lost can't get away anymore.


Of course, harbingers are crawling under the skin, dancing
when you dance, running when you run, slouching


on the couch with you, sitting there and later Fail
makes away with your dreams, a winter torments
the old river that wants to stream. But it


doesn't matter and the sphinx who asks us
the riddle who loves the most is nothing 
to get worked up about, we just take each other
by the hand and where the road ends we'll sleep.




Let us burn the old

     letters, watch all the beautifully
rain-smudged sun-bleached words and lines
go up in flames while shamelessly


retaining their contents. We have been 
lucky, oh we've been so –
                Let us


go and explore other cities, stroll down new
streets past buskers and rough sleepers
get used to leaving.
                Let us


eat there and drink and give


the singer enough to get drunk on
the beggar what he deserves.





Last Night

Saved two children last night,
lying under thin black ice.
One gone blue, the other grey.
I laid them down on the grass
that snapped and broke beneath my feet
rubbed them warm and dry and blew 
my breath into their little frames.


Then gazed out into the morning
that hovered tepid on the water
slipped into a sleeveless top
bunched some grasses in a vase
fished two children from their sleep.

Hester Knibbe (b. 1946) has published twelve books of poetry, including Archaïsch de dieren (‘Archaic the Animals’) which won the VSB Poetry Prize in 2015, and two collections of selected poems. Knibbe was awarded the Anna Blaman Prize (2001) and the Adriaan Roland Holst Prize (2009) for her poetry and served as Poet Laureate of Rotterdam between 2015 and 2017. Her work is widely published in magazines, anthologies and online, and has been translated into various languages.
Hungerpots, a selection of her work in the translation of Jacquelyn Pope, was published by Eyewear in 2015.






‘Yes’ was first published on Poetry International Web
http://www.poetryinternationalweb.net/pi/site/poem/item/24961/auto/0/YES
The originals of ‘Yes’ and ‘Let us burn the old’ are in Archaïsch de dieren, De Arbeiderspers, Amsterdam, 2014;
The original of ‘Last Night’ is in Een hemd van vlees, de Prom, Baarn, 1994.

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