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Pem Sluijter

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Moerheim 1944

Crawling from under the rhubarb leaf
to the edge of the pond,
vegetable garden with the bustle
of weeding and snails dropping
behind me – I was far from the house.

My house on the canal
where the billeted enemy
wore boots – but I was more afraid
of the colour of frogs the colour
of lily pad and the small toad that
flashed over feet in a brown suit:
their throbbing throats and mine.

Beyond grew roses and Russians
were on their knees weeding the strawberry bed.
They might have shared
the secret of the child’s tight-fisted hand,
the torn piece of a silk
parachute. If you saw a friend
not an enemy walk in the neighbourhood,
then you carefully
unfolded two fingers.

Pem Sluijter has worked as a journalist and for the Ministry of Foreign Affairs in The Hague, and has edited a quarterly on Third World problems. Her first collection of poetry, Roos is een en bloem (Rose is a Flower), was published by De Arbeiderspers in 1997; it was awarded the C Buddingh Prize for the best
first poetry book in the Netherlands.

Shirley Kaufman, who has published seven volumes of her own poems, and translations from Hebrew and from Dutch (she contributed to both our Dutch/Flemish issue, No.12, and our Palestinian/Israeli issue, No.14), has received the Shelley Memorial Award for lifetime achievement from the Poetry Society of America. She is co-editor of The Defiant Muse (Loki Books), the Poetry Book Society’s Recommended Translation for Spring 2000, reviewed in this issue. The poems here have been translated with the author.

Translated by Shirley Kaufman

Page(s) 188

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