Jan Kooistra was RIXT-poet of the month November 2019. You can read his original Frisian poems of that month here. The translation of one of them – ‘words not deeds’ – is published below.
words not deeds
recently I read that the Poet
Laureate wants to make the woods
dark again and that Greta Thunberg
is autistic, that once more the Kurds
leave everything behind
I was in Sachsenhausen the other day
where I heard horrible stories
I saw a young man crying
saw large numbers of ashen rooks
I heard the echoes in the distance
wanted to move to a village where
you can still see the stars
where the swallows fly in summer and
owls sit on the trusses in winter
sometimes I yearn for the courage
of that lassie from Sweden
and reclaim the dark from the woods
tell those tales again and
unseat all those false blowhards
but I shouldn’t step into
the garden late at night
and look up at that
infinitely glittering sky
because then I will be reduced
to tears like a little boy
© Jan Kooistra Translation: Trevor M. Scarse