PAUL SNOEK
MEDITATIONS IN THE DESERT
Here, everything is endlessly unending.
A hell of eternal sand
and in the chasm of the sky
the unremitting sun.
Here, you feel god’s presence
scorching up to your lips
like the venom that glows
in the pincers of the scorpions.
No sparrow, no moth, no fly.
Here the void is lord and master
and escape is impossible.
Here loneliness has the last word.
There are words that hiss like snakes.
Flesh-eating words with a snout full of teeth.
Dangerous words that sleep under sizzling stones
or that weave webs to trap their prey.
Some are transparent like glassy jellyfish
and spit poisonous ink from your mouth.
Others are ground into razor-sharp knives
or drip like pus from festering eyes.
Words sometimes wear deceitful masks.
They’ve learned the ropes of camouflage,
to bear fruit as walking-sticks
or seductively bewitch another word.
It is but a word for a word,
to change shape in an instant,
to winter a thousand centuries
as a time bomb in a clump of ice.
For at night lay an innocent word
like a babe asleep in its crib
and in the morning between the lukewarm sheets
you bump into a cold, spanking-new hand grenade.
—translated from the Dutch by Kendall Dunkelberg
