This week’s Friday Verses are written by Maud Vanhauwaert. We translated Gehavend (A Sorry Sight). This poem was first published in Dutch in Het Liegend Konijn, a magazine for contemporary Dutch-language poetry.
Maud Vanhauwaert (Veurne, b. 1984) writes and makes things. She obtained a Master’s degree in Language and Literature from the University of Antwerp and an MA in Verbal Art from the Antwerp Conservatoire, where she herself now teaches. For her poetic debut Ik ben mogelijk (I Am Possible, 2011, uitgeverij Querido) she was awarded the Woman’s Debut Prize, for her collection Wij zijn evenwijdig… (We Are Parallel, 2014, Querido) the Hugues C. Pernath Prize and the Public Prize of the Herman De Coninck Competition. In her work she seeks out playful theatrical forms to make poetry public. She has given performances, on radio and TV, at home and abroad, from opera houses to sheep pens. She has been appointed an honorary citizen of the town of Veurne and from 2018 to 2019 she was the city poet of Antwerp.
A Sorry Sight
1.
Far from home we’re a sorry sight
the lamp posts discreetly bent
over those bent by the streets
at night the screens glow
of all those who call home
in the palm of a hand a mother
in far too low a resolution
harbour cranes trembling in the water
a flickering letter in neon light
the city spreads its tentacles
in a city of the washed up
we form the Stranded Collective
2.
We’re a sorry sight far from home
city of grey conmen
hidden gold teeth
backlit frail white lines
snorted in the thunderworld
blue revolving lights take the drunken
binge still further, fake sirens
spherical pupils that dilate
in a city in a city in a city
where is my mother, where
her rotating hands around wet clay
the hollow between, let me be it.
3.
We’re a sorry sight far from home
in the bend on one side the city
and on the other side the fume-choked harbour
a smoking and derelict Gomorrah
with naked chickens and a blown-up fish
that with the oil gleams wonderfully mother-of-pearl-like,
the air so thick that it drips
the cranes stare like stuffed giraffes
on the quay, look how the light breaks
in the water, the necks crack and we just
combing the beach in the fever of finding something
that no one stole from us
4.
From far a sorry sight we are home
however I try endlessly
to refine, these verses narrow
channels for wide-ranging thoughts
the docks incubators
in which the Scheldt breathes restlessly
and a cruise ship passes with on it
boisterously waving animated folk
a swell like a threat
for all that’s fixed and complete
here in this city still
vague people keep the distance close.
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