The day opens its doors to set a poem loose,
the sun beats hard on the skin of the sluice.
A passing bridge blinks to let a boat break through,
it’s time to leave English and sing something new.
From Lauwersee to Dollard
and from Drenthe to the Wad,
I follow a passing seagull’s cry
and teach my father’s voice to sigh:
Vivace la flambardo
Fugere le mansardo
Parforce la Camargo
a doso kwatrupardo
Monete penicardo
Pericula san pardo
Finate par retardo
Etcetera ce fardo (H.N.Werkman)*
Another night sleepless in Hotel Simplon,
the creaking bedhead and the simpletons.
Shot bolt awake by the drill of the dawn,
who cares what these unswept streets will spawn?
We’re walking the lanes that Hendrik Werkman dredged,
chipping the gems from the pavement’s edge.
Past a man fishing, heron stood by his side,
to the dark Huis de Beurs where all hope has died.
This Groningen wind belts poems in my face,
I’d trade in old guilders to buy out of this place;
my brain’s pickled with Duvals,
and there’s blood on the walls.
Oh to die in the trash of this town,
ode-money tumbling from pockets of time.
Think I’ll whistle a tune straight from home,
and slash the pale wrist of my very last poem.
Last night I put a piper to bed,
music dripped from his heart and his worn fingers bled.
And I couldn’t get that woman out of my dreams,
and I couldn’t hear my dreams for her screams.
So the day leaps to life and a hymn springs to mind,
I’m just a poor down-and-out hoarding words that I find.
Drunk conversations swim round in the bowl,
I’m drowning with language this lonely old soul:
Vivace la flambardo
Fugere le mansardo
Parforce le Camargo
a doso kwatrupardo
Monete penicardo
Pericula san pardo
Finate par retardo
Etcetera ce fardo
Keith Armstrong,
Groningen, The Netherlands
*Improvised verse by poet and graphic artist Hendrik Nicolaas Werkman (1882-1945). Werkman was an experimental Dutch artist, typographer and printer. He was born in Leens, in the provence of Groningen. He was the son of a veterinary surgeon who died while Hendrik was young, after which his mother moved the family to the city of Groningen. Werkman set up a clandestine printing house (The Blue Barge) during the Nazi occupation and was shot by the Gestapo in the closing days of the war.
