Johan Höppener

Poems

Read:

Hold Here

Hold here—where marram roots, where wind has taught
this drift to keep its breath, this ridge to stand.
Set heel and palm. The sand receives your weight,
then breathes, then lifts a cool beat to your hand.

See cobbles keep last heat; a plank of oak
lies half in brine; tar threads the knotted rope;
a bell with rust-red lip swings out and in;
your fingers shine with pitch and salt and grit.

A child sets shells along the shining lip.
The foam comes in and edits shell by shell—
leaves three, takes two, rolls one a hand’s-width back
along the line. The gulls thin into sky.

Now lift your face: the moon salts out a path.
A pail beside the post begins to rise.
A buoy knocks the bar with wooden knuckles.
Far off, a harbour lamp goes out, then on.

Hold by the way the grasses lean and lift—
they yield, they gather; yield again, then stand.
Your footprint fills, goes smooth as pane of glass;
the edge steps up one pace, then waits, then steps.

Minutes of Air

In the matter of air and its dependants: we, the undersigned, being of sleepless mind,
petition for guardianship of rain.

Whereas summers now arrive escorted by blue light,
and winters go missing without a forwarding address;
whereas our children dream in orange — the colour smoke makes of noon —
we move that cloud, shade and thaw be held in trust
for those still drawing castles in chalk on pavements that remember riverbeds.

Jurisdiction: doorstep to estuary. Exhibits:
A) a pram’s wheels blackened by ash that fell like moths;
B) a baby monitor catching breath, steady as a lighthouse;
C) a tidemark on the nursery wall from a ‘one-in-a-century’ event, repeated.

Objections on behalf of Avoidance, Industry, and Elsewhere: inevitability, jobs, distant blame.
Counsel for Industry: who pays for restraint?

Minutes: we will — by walking, by mending — practise the slow arithmetic of less;
invoice, settled in breathable days.

Rebuttal (entered into the record):
the small hand around a thumb at 03:00,
the owl calling in April with a question that does not suit April,
the neighbour lifting wet photo albums one at a time, as if each had lungs.

Conditions precedent:
no permits at the birthplaces of salmon;
no dividend declared on the undoing of a coastline;
no advertising storms as ‘adventure weather’;
no euphemism where harm has learned our postcodes.

Injunction sought: to keep shade common, water local, heat honest.
Sunset clause: none, until winter returns with ID.

Witnesses: compost turning rot towards the future;
fox on the allotment, thin but cunning still;
the thermometer hidden in shade; the gutter’s silted archive at the corner;
a hose turning evening to mist — a secular baptism for courgettes and fence posts.

Oath: we will learn new lullabies and mean them.
Let the minutes show a ring of condensation sealing this page.
Let rain, if present, countersign.

Between Stations

The room has its lights down to a pilot glow.
Somewhere inside the skull a valve radio warms,
dial parked between stations:
a soft field of weather, no voice.

Keys wait. The tongue is a careful mechanic
with grease on its hands and one lost bolt.
Names sit where they fell and pretend to be screws.
I lift a sentence; it sifts back to parts.

No calamity—slack water.
Even the clock ticks in the next room,
as if courtesy could be learned from time.

Then heat returns to the smallest filament.
A shy syllable noses, testing the fence.

Another. The room agrees.

I do not ask for eloquence. I ask for fit:
consonant to consonant, the click of true.
When sound arrives, it’s not a parade—
only a lamp finding its own switch in the dark,
only a hand on paper leaving no ink,
only the quiet relief of there you are.

The Next Howl

At noon in the market a man pops his corked voice—
jagged babble spills, red as a cut finger.
He swears the air is thick with invisible wolves,
come for our children, come to eat the sun.
Mothers drag prams under awnings; a grocer
lets his brass weights thud the slab.
By dusk his tale prowls every alley.

We bar our doors. The far cry we hear
wasn’t there until his tongue bred it.
Neighbours put an edge on fear—
grindstones spit; door-bolts learn new bites.
Something furred is said to skitter under floorboards;
even the dogs lift their lips to the empty dark.

In the tavern’s foxed glass I swear off the brew
of panic. I keep my back to the room.
Still, at midnight my hand finds a pitchfork,
the handle varnished by other palms.
The loudmouths lower their voices, face the door;
my stare grows a pelt I cannot feel.

At first light we have a shape—no, a man—
roped and raw, hauled to the square.
Under ordinary blue we make a ring.
He is still raving wolves. The first stone flies;
the second answers; the third forgets its thrower.
Blood threads the gutter, quick as the day.

After, the square keeps its breath.
Beyond the walls a single cry lifts—
omen or echo, we cannot tell.
We shoulder our tools like rifles and drift
back to houses that hush when we enter,
children unmarked, cabbages still on their stalls.

In my palm a small stone stays red, warm.
At the pump it refuses the bucket,
sticks to my skin as if it has learnt me.
I drop it in the saucer by the key—
it ticks once, cooling—
and in the long quiet I hear my mouth
shape the start of the next howl.

Platform Six

At platform six I learned trains by timbre, not by boards:
the iron vowel of Utrecht, the Arnhem consonant.
Yellow screens stuttered; my feet, obedient, stayed.
I have followed sound, not signs.

Fluorescents salted the supermarket with thin white rain.
I rehearsed hello in the freezer aisle, chose milk
for the cap’s click, not its date.
My hands wanted the world aligned—
tins face-forward, cress rinsed until the water forgot its grit.
People shook sentences from their coats;
I laughed half a beat late.

In seminars I copied diagrams, not the quarrels on them—
a tidy axis settled my pulse.
At parties I stood where the room hummed evenly
and counted the gentle returns of the dishwasher,
plates confessing in porcelain.

Each morning I wore a borrowed face; the seam itched.

Then the white envelope—two pages giving me a name
I hadn’t known I could claim without apology:
a quiet noun, almost a harbour; and behind it
a key that didn’t excuse—only fitted.
The past rearranged itself: not a broken compass,
a different north that had always been there.

Words opened like doors in a wall. Step through;
feel the brick remember clay in your hand.
I had taken mirrors for windows,
copied the horizon onto glass.
Now the glass admits thickness; the world, its grain.
The lens bites the blur away and leaves a fair question:
who am I, if I stop reading the weather for everyone else?

After clinic I missed my train and didn’t panic.
I read the station map as if it were a hand—
lines joining to a warm centre.
The tannoy kept count with me.
I walked past Albert Heijn, past bikes locked to their own shadows,
past a boy practising a wheelie until the street found its balance.

I am older than this word, but it bears me.
It makes room for how light both hurts and helps,
why a copper coin anchors a pocket, how heat seeks edges.
I keep thinking of the sun on the dish rack—
plates set a finger apart so air can move between them,
so each can dry without leaning,
so I can stand, as at platform six,
and let the spacing do its work.