This coming week it’s my birthday. I’m taking family out to lunch near where I was born: a lovely bistro near the water. Here is a poem that I wrote on an excellent workshop with the poet Kei Miller.

My name

Even in the Netherlands my name is rare.
It comes from the Northern provinces,
a bleak windy place near the sea, near Germany.

People of the North grow tall to stand up to gales
that whistle, across bare fields, into your face.
A name so rare it’s not in the book of names.

I inherited this name from a grandmother
who was often ill to spite her husband.
I heard him shout behind the shop in a town

named after the beaver. Beavers on the façade
of the vegetable canning factory, the foundry roof.
My name means strong like the teeth of a beaver.

No, it doesn’t. I wish it did. Most children born
just after the war had bad teeth because
of the hunger winter: eating tulip bulbs to survive.

I wish I was named after the beaver, or the giraffe,
an animal strong enough to shatter a lion’s skull
with a single blow of its hooves.

In Dutch my name means people, folk or even
battle folk. My grandmother died at 55.
I’m beyond that age. I am an animal after all.