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Tsead Bruinja ​

  • bridgemaster
    ​
<
>
no total stranger she who brought the news
of your impending death I thought
I’ll sing then sing to salvage all
the things I know as yours before
 
the gates of hell I take the book
of forgetting on my lap and start
to fish you up from this dead script
more foreign still than any tongue
 
just like the time you tried to pull me out
of a hole in the ice under a bridge
panicked and ended in the drink yourself
I can’t escape this song
 
come father strap my skates on now
I’ve almost got my boyhood wellies on
come strap my skates on now
the ice is thin like your exhausted face
you stare at me through watering eyes
rise up from that thick woollen grave
and strap on my skates
the water will see us fly above it
 
mother brought us happy to the shore
where our first trip began with her
in our thoughts over transparent black
over careful watch out snags sticking up
 
frozen bream fish fingers I joked
trying to break the ice with
childish humour with childish hands
but you were with your wife sick at home
 
and almost in your place of birth the farms
blanketed winter-white over dumbstruck
grass green grass which once had known
the soft soles of the feet that now
 
alone with me without a girl raced over sad water
better than anyone else even mother
these ditches and fields knew you
this village with its churchyard full of familiar faces
 
the golden cock the sharp steeple
close to the farm where you
taught yourself short-wave and snare drum
where your father saw you galloping
 
no saddle bareback on the horse
the spade cut the ground early for him
who leant me his name three times
when I was too young to be called a father
 
come and strap on my skates
I’ve got the tight green wellies on
strap on my skates
the ice is thin as the temporary distance between us
now that I can look at you dry-eyed across the line
strap my skates on one last time
or climb once more into the pen
and let the paper see us flying racing
howling over ice
 
tell me again about the time you kicked
your music teacher who’d hit you hard
and gutless on the ear with a bunch of keys
right between the legs a so-called fainting fit
 
refused point-blank to apologise
authorities always pissed you off
at home where between the crooked and the straight
you ploughed your own deep path of pity
 
heavy as stone the lack of forgiveness balled
in your gut when you couldn’t wear the cross
round your neck and your mother no longer
had a heavenly home to wait for you in
 
strap on my skates father
this world is what’s real
between her and me you were the bridgemaster
summer has set in now my skates
are greased in the cellar
before us whirligig beetles dance on the water
the water is blue like slate
so beautiful so dark
 
 
Translation by David Colmer
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​Tsead Bruinja is a poet unafraid of delving into the alternative, the small and the unknown. For instance, Bruinja's debut collection was written in Frisian: De wizers yn it read (The meters in the red) appeared in 2000, with little worry over the relatively small number of the language’s readers. From 2003 onward, however, after publishing Dat het zo hoorde (The way it should sound), he also began publishing his collections in Dutch.

Bruinja actively searches for unknown, unfamiliar artistic grounds. In addition to being a poet, he is a critic, performer, editor, interviewer, teacher and, when a Frisian Bob Dylan tribute album was released, even a musician and singer. The poet deliberately seems to investigate the broader, wider uses of his writing in order to discover new and surprising poetic configurations. Bruinja's collaborations with painters and sculptors, such as Milou van Ham, René Knip and Joep van der Made, should be seen as examples of this endeavor. Still, such expansive curiosity does not seem to slow down Bruinja's poetic production. After Dat het zo hoorde, he has published five more collections of poetry, of which Ik ga het donker maken in de bossen van (2019) is the most recent.
 
In 2019, Bruinja became the seventh poet laureate of the Netherlands, an office he holds for two years until passing the baton.






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  • Home
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