Prose and poetry by Leen Raats
And then everything suddenly seems to fall into place
like a puzzle that has been lying
on the table for many months, untouched.
How you find space here to breathe
among pollard willows who, like stubborn peasants
with their hands in their pockets, lean against the wind.
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This morning I woke up in the dark.
With pain in my stomach and the voice of the radio newsreader.
Yet the day felt clean. Birds sang along the railway track.
At Brussels Central Station I saw a beggar with a bloodstained face
who no one seemed to see. I asked if I could help. I couldn’t.
Even though I know all about being invisible.
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Deep inland we soon
forget the infinity of the sea.
Today I follow rivers
ruthlessly heading for their end
as I carry sorrow like an old backpack
that shaped itself to the curve of my back
and a smile that is not mine.
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You are safe now I’m here.
Muscles grown, back straight, fists ready.
No one will harm you.
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After all these years you still don't know
how to live, just like every night you
seem to have forgotten how to fall asleep.
It feels indeed like falling
into the arms of the unknown
that you should have been
familiar with by now.
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I'll just have to learn to live with it
said the specialist who casually diagnosed an illness
which he didn't explain, which I had never heard of
but from which I had been suffering for years
and that maybe it was partly my own fault.
I shouldn’t have been so eager to live.
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We are made up of layers.
Like this landscape that
reads like an old book.
Crooked apple trees with names
reminding me of a song
that hasn’t echoed
over these hills for a long time.
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When my mother died, my heart shrank
to the size of a pea.
A blue whale has a heart the size of a small car
with arteries you could swim through, but it beats
only twice a minute.
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Grief is feminine. I greet her, an old acquaintance
with whom I grew up, grew askew
who pulled at me my entire youth, dragged me
into a bottomless darkness. So often I fell.
Sometimes I would lie there, paralyzed by a fear
that seemed to come from nowhere, and yet so real.
L’enfer c’est les autres but hell is heaven
compared to what sometimes rages in my chest.
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Influencers without influence are looking for
the hippest hashtags for their Tiktok videos
dancing to the beat of the algorithm.
Incompetent experts by experience
whose unfinished projects grow too fast like children
give TED Talks about the power of failure
with a voice like the melody
of a lonely pinball machine.
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Leen writes 