The poem ‘Fury’, which today can also be read in the Leeuwarder Courant, the Friesch Dagblad and at Omrop Fryslân, was written in response to the attack on Utrecht and the result of the elections, a black day on which yesterday spring at World Poetry Day started.

*

How someone with a charge of furious hate
in his heart, fuse burning, steps into a train,
a tram or shop, beside himself with rage,

head full of night, lost deep in his own dead ends,
trying to fight his grim way out, with all the hatches
of his soul nailed shut, and empties every chamber.

*

How one morning someone manifests himself,
his radical insanity, shutting down the entire machinery
of a city as if ordained to do so by some Higher Power,

while there’s always someone whose hands aren’t dirty,
simply innocent, but thanks to crime and punishment
a passenger on Death’s tram now.

*

How deep in the forest of violence all
the clocks freeze, full stops in the sky,
as everyone, petrified in a moment of terror,

no longer knows which path to take,
no longer knows which path to take as the owl
of hate weaves into B.’s new order.
 
Translation: David Colmer