Palimpsest

Now I know who you are, hidden in discarded old paper
you appeared like a distant echo in the nakedness of my
scattered dreams, in a room rich in dust and gallantries,
where misty light bathes all in a fiery glow, here gods watch
your ecstasy, pain red as blood shimmers in the vaults deep
beneath the ochre chamber, where I am no more than a sigh
escaping your ever so slightly parted lips at the moment of highest
desire, less still: an infant child, unwanted and unseen, a spectator,
a ghost, hands against my ears so that your pleading for mercy becomes
a whisper still sizzling softly in the wind on a warm summer evening.

To dust you have long since perished, my own calloused hands
dug your grave, before winter froze the black ground, and afterwards
in every shade I saw your shadow, pure and untouched by worm
and bacteria, and now you’re back, captured and sold in a slave
market to the highest bidder, used and cast aside, picked up
and treasured like a long-lost jewel, memory of the sparkling
and immeasurably precious treasure of a distant and forgotten
potentate who saw his vast empire buried under desert sand.

Of me only marble fragments remain, fallen over and broken
into a thousand pieces, a prey of the elements for centuries
and reduced to my essence, which reveals itself once I have
come closer to you, closer than ever before, and finally nestling
in the hollow of secrets where death and stasis reign, a sarcophagus
that reveals itself as my final, long foretold and fabled destiny.

Modern poetry as a means to unveil truths

When she passes, the street is a sigh of fragrant flowers
and beauty – cell phones race without leaving a trace
across digital highways with in their wake news of fronts
and images evaporating like essential oils from a glass jar,

but when she passes, the road is a tunnel of desire for
beauty and the intoxicating scent of flowers that as if
springing forth from a fountain engulfs and saturates us
as her image appears on our screens and we lie face down

on the forest floor and inhale the scent of something
primal, which is that from which everything springs
forth, for which we have only vulgar words or

names because it wants to remain hidden behind a veil
of not thinking or knowing, we feel her with all our twenty-
seven senses gently swaying in the liquid in the glass jar.

Enno de Witt is a published Dutch author and poet, an artist and musician, webmaster and editor. For him, writing poetry is a sheer necessity, like breathing, sleeping, drinking and eating. His poetry is founded on the bedrock of the classics, Dutch as well as international, and revolves around the Eternal Questions, often using imagery pertaining to his younger years, growing up on the seashore amongst wild heretics.