HAVING A PLACE Poem by Hester Knibbe

1

One day the image you have of yourself
no longer corresponds to what you see in the mirror.

In it stands someone you recognize
as the person you are, but looking as if a jet

sleep came over it and a winter in which
it was white and silent and afterward

came rain, a storm hung
to dry under the heavens. That

shrivels in your mirrored face. In your head
lives an image from last summer, but now you

face another season, you have to line your eyes
again, do something with your lips, revise yourself.



2

One day the one you fell in love with has disappeared.
You live in the same house and you care about each other,

sure, but another kind of tenderness
is needed to break through to each other and

sometimes a reticence sits down to dinner
that is difficult to overrule.

Not that the bodies don't speak to each other,
they still stroke and touch every Eden, explore

every heaven, but there are also small
torn stitches in the seam of love, invisible

in mirrors, because it had to drag itself
across the earth, catching on twigs and stones.