translated by Arno Bohlmeijer

For longer I’ll be away. 
Further from base I hold still: 
being homesick thwarts my will. 

Having left on a whim, 
for a bloom, for a crescent moon, 
for the illusion of another existence, 

I am simply who this is, 
living on for the sense of missing, 
which is its motive. 

Always in the eye of the literary storm, Ed Hoornik was a poet, journalist, editor, novelist, playwright, and the tireless force behind literary magazines. He survived the Dachau concentration camp, after which his work is often about death and survivor’s guilt. Even before the war his poetry contained warnings against the Nazi regime: “it’s only ten hours by train to Berlin.” “Timelessness” is the most striking aspect of his work. 

Arno Bohlmeijer is the winner of a PEN America Grant 2021, a poet and novelist, writing in English and Dutch, published in six countries, and in Universal Oneness: an Anthology of Magnum Opus Poems from around the World, 2019.