TROMPENBURG by Manuel Kneepkens

Poems

(Publication in Dutch by Uitgeverij De Contrabas - Utrecht 2016)

Manuel Kneepkens ( Heerlen, 26th February, 1942) is a poet, writer (on current affairs), painter, politician and jurist-criminologist. He lives in Rotterdam.

(The numbers above the poems are the page numbers of the Dutch publication)

7.

Arboretum Trompenburg

Outside it rains on the grounds of F.C. Excelsior
above the fairy tale book of the grass
a butterfly flutters on every page.

around the square pond, constricted
in a thin corset of flags, I stroll
nude before the tongue of the wind

and between beeches, reconciled
with gold dust of the afternoon
the other cheek of the universe

Jasmine tea
comfort me at Avenue Concordia
there my afternoon will be an icon of autumn

and my cautious slurping stained-glass-face
below a hat of Jugendstil
Fairy King Oberon passing through the Low Countries

10.

Box

This man has fallen
for a woman
on the grass


the load of his desire
rests on his belly
an apple, flushing red falling upwards

                                    Newton, Newton, how can that be ?

The woman with the gold-blond eyes
languor
her summer-dress

Look, she comes from behind the blue of the sky
she kisses the cheeks of the bashful man
(poor, poor blue-beard...)
into box-hedge

(in which two wag-
tails are now
cheerfully on the job...)

Then free of worries she takes up residence
in that (Garden of Olive) green

Permanently

11. 

Tulips

                               Bygone the tulips kissed
                               with lips. Marilyn Monroe's
                               red

                              They never heckled muslims on the street
                              'The balls to your Allah'

                              But they sang from 9 to 11
                               'To the bulbs, to those lovely
                              bulbs...'

                              And now...how they conciliate now?


Vondel Park, look how he goes, our VOC-man
with his purple eye patch
on his left eye
and his scarlet coat the wrong way around

for Spring's specul-
ation
to declare on the white of war
of the swans

Professor Tulip! What are you doing?
Nightwatch's Golden Girl
on your cut flower table?

Oh, Rembrandt
with your self-portrait with turban
as from a Turquoise Non-
native
full of homesickness to the Bosphorus

so light melancholic
as the song, the nonexisting

                     Tulips from Rotterdam

12.

Daffodils

Comedian Spring raises his straw hat:
'Daffodils, what is keeping your Brassband?'

Listen, how they paint with their trumpets
still life Swing

How they blare in total silence

                                     O, when the saints go marchin'in...

Typical flowers, daffodils

don't make music bright blue
or red

(hyacinths do that
with their brothel smell, heavy
with New Orleans...)

but swinging cool
pale yellow

or dizzy white:

                                      Pascha est!

                                     Jazz man Jesus
                                     ascends
                                     out of
                                     his saxophone

13.

Crocuses

                                                 A good man is hard to find...

                                                 Blues singer Nessie Smith

Foals of gold satin, frolic
on the chessboard of spring
bedazzle us with light

How, how deep in your lap
xylophones
                    leap,
half frozen

                             Clown! Clown!

Hallelujah- negro children's choirs:

       Or will it now start snowing innocence...?

Spring. This will be a chess season
of new happiness
on Grassy Meadows!

Look, the filigree of hard frost
on the lashes of winter
already begins to thaw on TV!

14.

Bruiseworts- Daisies

Children offer you, mother Mary, at least, your statue,
their freshly picked flowers
and you observe it with your pottery smile

I was also a fan of yours once, after all
with in my tiny hands
almost the same (bruised) daisies

Mother of God, why is your Son dead as a doornail
since I live north of the rivers?

Madre de Dios
Only the red May Day remains for me now

that of the Leftwing Church-
father
Herman Gorter

                              Marx, Lord of Saint-Aldegonde?

15.

Lobelias

                                              Bald- Baldy! - ruhest Du auch!

                                                                                    Goethe

Once old we will look like plucked
poultry 
to church you louts in nature

Cackling corpses...

But..the pebbles
on our graves will be better raked /

than during our lifetime
our teeth...

Let then grow tender on our stripped
bones

                  Lobelias

Hear how they groan:

                  'Goethe! Goethe!'

16.

Snowdrop

In the Snowdrop Queen's house
the child soldier practises
with her (whitewashed) little flame-thrower

Hear, what Mr. World Peace
Chief Pigeon of the UN
coos
through a blaring megaphone
at the puny girl
high above the stable of Bethlehem

'Snowdrop! Snowdrop!
Do you see nothing yet coming from East Congo?'

No answer....

Snowdrops are appallingly shy

They blush by and large
about nothing

Like all premature
born!

All !

17.

Fairy Wings

The sun lounge of her doll's house
on the coffee table the tea set
cracked / antique porcelain /
(glued again!)
provides a view

across a lawn
close-cropped, impeccable jade
as far as the little pond
abandoned, except for one autumn-leaf

                                      Timid hands
                                      weave together around hoop
                                      & stake

Her decadent eyes will be vacant
when she opens them

I call out to her

                                      Fairy wings! Fairy wings!

18.

Strawberry

Whoever eats a strawberry
a sooty red one
eats back his youth

his mother, singing
under the laundry of the clouds
Songs of Darkness

O, when the blackbirds
got entangled
in father's strawberry netting

In the blackest of the Mijnstreek
under the privet hedge
you had to bury them

And look, the gooseberry & the currant & the dogberry
rustle & bend & wave
as in the cloaks of the Three Kings,
brocade of Adoration

'Thus, Mothers, kiss in my name
on cheeks Nirwana
the naked skin of your babies, strawberryful

For I am the Strawberry
who takes and eats me
eats back his youth....'

Thus the Strawberry kisses the earth- with juicy red lips!

19.

Apricot

My neighbour's apricot flowers
a delicate shimmer of white & light orange
is woven like candy floss around the little tree

last night, totaly pissed
a student to the bone
                     //
I pruned my neighbour's apricot

Like teeny-nippels, staggeringly naked
the blossoms now blush
on my neighbour's lawn

Now my neighbour threatens castration
and death...

But my neighbour's daughter, thanks to me,
is now taking a course I ke ba na

Apricots she calls tenderly

                        the mat-golden testicles of the Buddha

and my loony
mushy
soul:

                        a sepia apricot

20.

Clematis

Clematis, thick as a fist, blue as a rectum
crept up the fence. Beneath it daddy
longlegs shelter, messengers from the Thousand Year Empire

And around the drainpipe twisted St. Sebastian
behind the garden white of his loincloth

Oh, garden in the buzzing Nirvana of dawn

I am the Vine! I am the Vine!

21.

Elderberry - Sambucus nigra

The Birthplace of Hans Christiaan Andersen
you offered protection. The whole of Denmark
schoolchild under your roof of foliage!

But also further inland your mysterious
rustle
known in the summer evening, elderberry
''Wenn die weisse flieder wieder bluh'n!''
the soldiers' jackboots sung, every war again, in love

Poor elderberry, once you cured Europe, you
with your juicy dark berry eyes

Later you turned Rotterdam
and porcelain Dresden
to flames!

22. 

Ornamental onion - Allium

The truth is...the truth is an onion-dzjinn
a fairy tale onion with thickish tricks

His father a citrus fruit
as elongated as a ski. Very special!

His mother: an Ottoman rose, on which one rose-
hip, strongly smelling of the Fire of Troy

In short, just like a hermetic text, the onion-dzjinn is to us
at first sight absolutely inedible

But essentially grafted on centuries of Crown of thorns 
& bursting with blood-red sap

In the Near East it is therefore called the onion-peach
as onarguable energy-fruit, this fruit

& inside so rotten
as the nuclear programme of the state of Iran

In short:

      an onion-dzjinn is an onion-dzjinn- is an onion-dzjinn

for theologians from Kampen as well as for muslims

                            Fatwah! Fatwah!

our Brothers!

23. 

Ivy - Hedera

Casinolaan. In the morning
only the blackbirds were allowed to heal
the cracks here between the kitchen & scullery
of my parental home

and all the Fairy Tales from my childhood
look, they were revealed to me there, rustling
out of that sooty forest under my window
called: Ivy

or ding-donged towards State Mine Wilhelmina
(As well as Mary Magdalene's bedroom secret

                             Jesus has risen!

Oh, really? Also in Terwinselen- borough of Kerkrade?)

Since then my senses are only allowed to rise
like those of Lazarus
Palestine's Tutankhamun
with his eyes, carbon-
rimmed:

Miners were heroes, in those days...

Because who else than they
dared to toil like that
in the pickaxe-line underground

as if they, the black people there - of all places
in the Borobudur of the Carboniferous
could not die...

little merula on an anthracite branch!

24. 

Coins of Judas (Honesty)

                            There is no crucifixion anymore
                            That's progress

                            But Coins of Judas still flower everywhere!


Wonderful is the life of musicians in South-Limburg
one Gobelin of olive-green fugues, towards Maastricht

but the life of poets is blacker
than carbon paper

(B. Aafjes in Troy...) (P. Kemp on the Laura...)

they constantly have to wipe out the Mining district 
from within, with a handkerchief of ink

as Jesus once wiped his forehead
with a veronica from the Borinage
on the way to Catalonia

Hear, how the kiss of their word
is paid, treacherously
with a pay envelope (transparent)

contents:

                                   30 pieces of silver

                             (miners' widows' pennies)

                                             brown

                                               lung

                                              wages

25. translation in progress
26. translation in progress
27. translation in progress
28.

Geraniums

Time for small things now, for raindrops
sluggish
down my window - silver degeneration

as well as the withered light of sunset
on my geraniums ( or are they pelargoniums?)
as rust-coloured-
red
as the half decayed colour

of Hollywood femme fatale dresses, low-
cut
during the Technicolor-Era in the Fifties 
(and later the Eastmancolor-process...)

But....what have I to complain about?
Daily I still read my future
in the Evening paper

the Death notices

Without Glasses!

29.

Irises

Look, how they amorously reflect
the pupils of Provençal
troubadours

worshipping the stark nakedness
of courtly, medieval Women

(Husbands' clumsiness absent
because on Crusade
challenging the muslims in the Holy Land)

             Dearest, how is your tongue on mine?

                        As Abélard on Heloïse

                                 or as Heloïse
                                          on
                                     Abélard?

Oh, Irises, so heraldicly blue.....

but in your with summer
sun
perfumed morning dresses

oh, smelling
so beneficent
of adultery !

30. translation in progress
31.

Sansevieria

''Dutchie!'' the Sansevieria calls:
''Open the gate for me
the naughtiest of your fantasies!''

So there she sits
Comtesse Struyck of Flanders
Countess Cul de Wallonie...

With on her tonque - très pleasant
an expensive
Praline de Bruxelles

With a lack of shame she sticks, Lady of Pleasure
one of her hands
under her secret calotte

and with the other
(on this Official Portrait in Gand / Ghent
wisely not depicted...)

she picks her groans
black gold-
tinted like Tintin en Congo

not in the name of the Rhine
or
Rembrandt

But in the name of
the Scheldt
of Rubens

ànd Manneken
(Tant)
P i s !

32.

Gardener

Charitable I walk around
with the harp of my rake
with scooping shovel

I send slugs
back to their saunas
chace wood lice
escalator up
                     escalator down
into the basement-
departments of their shadowy
emporiums

Because I'm on earth for this purpose
to sculpture out of light
with hoe, with garden-shears, with fork

flower beds, lawns, arbours
museums for the wind

tolerant stillnesses

as if suddenly
from the darkeness of my pond,

prince Frog plunges

a sound aged with peace
in this poem
of a gardener

very short

33. translation in progress
34.

Hortus concluses

                                                  Peacock butterflies
                                                 You who deny death
                                              on your downy triangles

                                                        PASCHA EST!

I loved sunflowers even as a child
I adored the Hydrangia
also I walked regulary with the Invisible
along the box hedges in my father's garden

Between the scorzonera and the chicory
happy great tit & wagtail hopped
Bees were buzzing. Tomato plants,
blushing happily, raised themselves towards us

Oh well, it looked like summer for ever
Off season for wasp & cherub!
And He? Ivy entwined the antiquity of his T-shirt
his dungarees of cumulus
(couturier: Michelangelo)

''God, what will I become​?'' I asked

''Be like my Son
Get off with Mary Magdalene!''

35.

Butterfly bush - Buddleja

In my garden a butterfly bush glitters
loved by those who hang themselves
Every morning at least one is swinging
between the pubescence of the leaves

Now I have built a high lattice around my garden
against the urge of so many suicidals
Sodium lamps are burning day and night

But now they plunge all of a sudden into my little pond
/the radial arteries cut/
they cloud my waterlilies purple
they spray my plastic heron with blood

And where I once planted daffodils
the corpses of seventeen-year-old
examinees are now decaying
kissing with mouldy lips
the hot favourite mouth of the Moon

that licentious celestial body, that in the coach of the night
- shaded and made of goldleaf - rolls by
slowly, slowly without end, in the Milky Way

onboard a High Mandarin, far away from the Court in Peiping
his precious, ivory fan - a gift from the emperor!
flapping
in front of his doll's face of Ming porcelain

as if in Venice a Swallowtail
flutters
high above a funeral in the Canal Grande.

                         ''The Doge is dead!


                       Long live the Dogessa!''


36.

Whitethorn

Because of you, princess Whitethorn
through man-size bushes forcing
and the gate of your former Pleasure Castle opening

Look, how nettles cover there - hordes! hordes! -
the cobbles of the inner court, gleaming from misty rain
as do the wheels of your Glass Coach

Rough Chervil - Socrates' killer - & Wolf's milk
stretch there the hollow of their stems
to the bones of your late coachman
on his box of eternal shadow

Look, how his top hat has fallen down
between the Henbane
of which the leaves are spotted
like the poison-belly of (formerly) an adder

To say nothing of Mandrake, the Horror plant
in the language of Death
ánd Rue, more of the same (black) medicine!

And inside, in the Gothic dining-room
the eye of the mantel clock blind there
the Delft crockery blue with mildew

And in the kitchen
malicious chef, grunting, snoring,
for a hundred years!
& his lanky little cook's boy
good-for-nothing!
Both, oh, as stiff as wooden spoons!

Princess, in your mossy shrine of glass in the forest
toads already rout around between your legs....
Solely moonlight polishes up a snail there
gnawing at your nipples

Sorry, Princess, that I'm too late forever!

37.

Roses - the rose painter

The roses themselves, the red, the white, the golden
oh, that's simple....
as the rose painter of roses says:

Nothing more than the result of precocious
light perfumed thoughts
on late summer nights.....

(''Blessed are the meek....'')

but oh, oh, the rose leaves!
that introverted chubbiness
as from the hands of poets

''who only knew the pen...''

Not to mention the thorns
I would rather keep quiet about them

Ah, painting roses... it is
as if an even more light-hearted person than me
once, in a more light-footed era than ours
wrote to his Mistress, Courtier
to the Court of Versailles:

Foolish little wig-wearer
under your hoop skirt à la Watteau
creased pink.....

Remember:
                      L’Ėté, c’est Moi!

                      I'm the summer!

38. translation in progress
39. translation in progress
40.

Rhododendrons

Now the rhododendrons bloom
eye-intoxicating

like Hollywood stars
in the Fifties

Esther Williams
who dives elegantly from

the High

(pale-blue)

Grace Kelly, gracefully
Princess of Monaco

(lipstick-rose)

Audrey Hepburn
in Roman Holiday

(off-white)

Thus bloom the Rhododendrons

like Beauty Queens
on the backs of Vespas in Rome

And what about Marilyn Monroe?

Marilyn

blossoms

all around!

41. translation in progress
42. translation in progress
43. translation in progress
44.

Tree of Heaven – Ailanthus altissima

Tree of Heaven
What a painful century, the Twentieth
Genocide throughout!

The shamans Wilburn and Orville Wright
sent their bewitched insect into the air
under your defoliated branches

See, Hiroshima & Nagasaki
lost in the shadow
of your scorched crown

As on Japan's blood-stained flag
the red of the evening sun
in the (last) snow on top of Mount Fuji

On the moon, meanwhile, Josephine Baker
kept pulling her banana-skirt
off / on / off / on / off

oh, like a neon sign
on Alexanderplatz
Berlin, in the late Twenties

Furthermore Im Westen nicht neues
As also in the East

45.

Larix

                                           Green, you are such a lovely green

                                                                Frederico Garcia Lorca

If I had a piece of land, I would plant a larch
because next to a larix or lork*
belongs a Gooi's house in Laren or Blaricum
with a vivid red-tiled roof - pure Thirties
Where in the attic I would shack up
like a very old-fashioned poet
with a typewriter

Sometimes I would hear the sound of pans from the kitchen
or popular music on Hilversum radio
(or a Remembrance of Guernica...who knows...)
and / or bicycle bells of my children
back from Spanderswoud

But most of the time it would be quiet, mysteriously quiet
as if an old Basque grandmother
or a raven-haired Andalusian woman
croaking like an old 78 record
wearing an apron of Catalan clouds
reads out loud from an old book of fairy-tales
from long before the time of Franco

And slowly, very slowly
I would myself become a larix...
or maybe.. if all my needles should fall
below the terrific starry sky
above the Alhambra
in the Granada of the Interbellum period

A green Lorca
with a green laptop

*Dutch word for larch, in sound akin to Lorca's name.

46.

Pumpkins - Antibarbari

                                                    What a rude mind!


                                                      I suspect him

                                                     of being a Dutchman

                                                                            Erasmus

Against the ticking of the rain on the caravan
I cut a pumpkin
/ right across / through his rind of sun /

Look, the cheeks of my children are shining
And the rain, that drenching import from Holland
Listen, how it cembalowes
Plunk! Plunk! On the fields of Toscany

Wherein shadows now suddenly appear, rust-coloured
curly-haired, Etruscans
as on their frescos - polaroid holiday snaps
yellowed, dateless...

Oh, Marx-brothers of the Antiquity
oh, Groucho, oh, Harpo, oh, Chico, oh, Zeppo...
how long is it since your laughing fell silent?

To call the full moon with their panpipes
that plump fruit from the tables of the gods
thrown for comfort in the night
to us, Olandesi, on our long, long way back
to the north

Pumpkin Obesitas

/ clashing orange

47.

Waterlily - Song of the Water Manager

                                                              30th April, 2013

My oar lifts a waterlily
jade leaf after jade leaf
Than it sinks again slowly
into the Land of Nod,
Nymphaea, queen of the canals
& ditches of Holland

Is he really still searching for the Grail
(King Arthur's golden plumbing....?!)

that fair country lad of yours
or is he from all that (passing) water forever silly
locked in the Royal Loony-Bin, a long time ago?

Whose future royal hand rows nowadays
your silver reflection up to the clouds?

                 Is it the eternal other,
           with his high lace collar of (faded) ideals
                 of William of Nassau...

                 Water Prince W.A. ter Lelie?

48.

Hortensias

Cauliflower-like crowns, faded to blue
as pinafores, hung
in Bruynzeel kitchens in the Fifties

Not unlike great-aunt Hortense
whose portret in oils (slightly damaged)
rests in compulsory peace in our attic
next to her Art Deco waterjug
(broken...) (glued...) (en broken again...)
& the desolation
of great-uncle Eugéne’s cuspidor, her
good-for-nothing husband

but look, in Spring all of a sudden she is approachable again
in her Sunday best raised from the dead...
ma vieille tante Hortense
and she speaks her dutchy French
as if she just, from the chicest hairdresser in Paris,

                              Maison Osiris

boogie-woogied onto the Champs-Élysées
(together with her lover Mondriaan...)

Her coiffure blue, shocking, almost greenish
un bleu emouvant se rejouir du vert...
a highly frivolous tint for someone already years in the grave...

As for her twin-sister, great-aunt Charlotte, the Needlework artist

                             Get cooking, red dyke!

another time, another meal!

49.

Grass

                            Summer, how do I keep the grass luxuriant?

                            Lover, lie there with your sweetheart


Midday. Midi. The shadowless hour
Farmers turn the horizon, flashing
with their mowing machines

Look, sunlight rains on her smile
She wears her sun necklace,
and nothing else but the side of the ditch

How shall I name the swarming
of her freckles
among the insects' dances
copper-red duckweed?

How the twinkling of her eyes
diadems of turquoise?

Hear, Dog Days, rough barking Dog Days
at the gates of Hades
She was my bride-in-the-grass

And our Witnesses?

The sweating crowns of the farmers
on the centaurs of their tractors
bumping between the ditches

and the pollard willows!

50. translation in progress
51.

Oleander

Oh, Oleander, to be fondled by you
by your blood-curdling, with red nails
decorated fingertips

Oh, Oleander! Sensual Madonna
of the mediterranean summer

Oh, kissed, glorious to be kissed, forever
by your blood-red Moorish lips

Oh, Oleander, most fragrant of flowers
for baby boomers on holiday...

                       Olè! Olè!

Oh, Oleander, I must measure udders for the bulls
of Pamplona

                   The Hell of Job!

52. translation in progress
53. translation in progress
54.

Ginkgo biloba - Maidenhair tree

Who cuts the toenails of the Emperor of Japan
the Exalted Ruler
under his Exalted Tree?

Me? Never in my life!

Indeed I would prefer to give His Exaltedness
because of World War II
a firm Beating
on his Exalted Buttocks

qua form as similar as
the dicotyledonous leaf
of the Ginkgo tree

But no. I bow & bow
& smile like an outmoded Japanese
and write a haiku

for whom?

Not
for the Exalted One!

For the Ginkgo!

55.

Chrysanthemums

                                               White chrysanthemums
                                               by moonlight
                                               save on grave-lamps

November. Month, in which the mist
changes father Redwine
into reverend Whitebread

and rabbi Kosher
turns a cartwheel in the soul
of imam Halal...

Oh, like a roguish Walt Disney-piggy
unstunned
slaughtered

Death rises
grunting with pleasure
out of his own grave (!)

and dances
waving with a large bouquet of chrysanthemums
the Hornpipe!

Death
give us the Hiphop! Or the Breakdance!

Don't be so ridiculously
old-fashioned!

56.

Bramble-bush

I pedal into the afternoon on my autumn-bike
hoping for a line of poetry
for my part just from a chestnut
fallen at the edge of the cycle path
shining, still half in his shell

Suddenly I hear out of a bramble-bush
-Yes, from where else?
the burning voice of nothingness

Pinchy!

Your poems: rotting shrooms
Sickening comfort food
none will sink in

You dismount, bewildered
(No one to be seen...)
In gods name away from here quick

And you step into the night, up-
set
/ as a broken man

Like once Marinus van der Lubbe
in front of his Nazi-judges in Germany...

Holy Moses! Afterall it is not the Reichstag
burning here. It is only a bramble bush!

A thorny angry one
with Gilles de la Tourette syndrome:

                                 Pluck me, clodhopper! Pluck my fire!

Term of abuse: Yahweh
                                        Pseudonym: ((( )))
Pet name: Death!

57. translation in progress
58.

Sunflower

                                           Like an old dilapidated comedian
                                           she lifts her straw hat
                                           for the last time

                                           Who applauds?

                                           Only the rain

How she stands there at the back of my autumnal garden slowly dying
this Cosmos-flower
with almost human disguise

As if Max Ernst
paints over
a Van Gogh

/queen Nefertiti

on broken stem/

Now bowing even for the autumn-moon

Formerly
her eunuch...

59. translation in progress
60. translation in progress
61. translation in progress
62. translation in progress
63. translation in progress

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