poets Laureate 3: Hagar's poem

I realised that there are probably a lot of people who can't read the poems by the Dutch candidates for poet laureate. So I decided to translate Hagar Peeter's submission to the NRC Handelsblad. Apologies to Hagar if I didn't do her justice.

Poem about the year 2008 by Hagar Peeters

Poem without rhyme or reason

Dear dead postman, traffic cop, lady police chief

for me you are the heroes of 2008

you and all the others thanks to whose (my stepfather corrected this)
alertness we can dream

I am a twelve year old girl

my father also died as a result of senseless violence
the man who had beaten him to death said at the trial that if he hadn’t
been fighting but had read my poem instead he would not have killed
my father

when you read a poem you have to pay attention
and maybe you’ll feel a bit emotional
and when you think or feel emotional you can’t be angry anymore

when you’re very drunk you can’t read poems, so first
you have to not be drunk if you want to read this poem
and if you hit people because you’re drunk maybe you won’t hit them anymore because you’re not drunk because you’re reading this

you can also count to ten but counting to ten is boring

everybody who has killed someone without any reason
has probably heard a song once they really liked

a poem is a like a song written down, a song you can like

it is sad when people sing beautiful songs but nobody listens to them

it is sad when people write poems but nobody reads them because
everybody is too busy being so impatient that they want to hit someone

somebody who beats somebody else to death thinks at that moment
that it’s the most important thing in the world
but there are poems that say something that is even more important
I want to give this poem to all the men and women in all the prisons
where they are uselessly spending useless time because they
killed somebody without reason
except that they had nothing better to do
so that they can read my poem because
they’ve got nothing better to do anyway


if they can’t read this I can have it translated for them
because this poem doesn’t rhyme anyway so
it’s easy to translate

it’s a very easy poem that everyone can probably understand

because I am a twelve year old girl and my father was beaten to death
by someone who got up on the wrong side of the bed