This is my 300th blog post. Many thanks to all the blog’s followers, also for your likes and lovely comments. They are much appreciated. I’m taking a break from weekly blogging: I need to ‘fill the well’ – take myself out to find poems and art on the streets of The Hague, get inspired and fired up again. I’m celebrating the 300th post in the company of Cecile Bol – our August guest poet.

Cecile is also the organiser of the Poetry Society’s Groningen Stanza. When I moved back to The Netherlands , I was fortunate that their meetings were on Zoom due to the lockdown. It was great to meet Cecile and other members of the Stanza in person earlier this year. The hotel where I stayed is just a few houses down from the literary café De Graanrepubliek where they meet.

I have chosen three poems from Cecile’s chapbook Fold me a Fishtail. Read more about Cecile and the book below her poems.

yet you speak of resilience

there are things that make me sink back into the grave
(red on black, stardust freckles, knee socks, foxy wrists)
inside Plato’s cave, where moving shadows are safe

I saw a flowered brown tie turn into a snake
woke up crying, your shoulder blade stuck to my lip
there are things that make me sink back into the grave

same table, same cheap wine, same talk, another day
you pull me close as if you’re not pushing me in,
inside Plato’s cave, where moving shadows are safe

like the cute demon I asked how I should behave
– he said ‘always choose slyly between loud and still’ –
there are things that make me sink back into the grave

they nibble at my feet, ask if this time I’ll stay
(petrol candy, flawed magic, and plenty to kiss)
inside Plato’s cave, where moving shadows are safe

I seep through layers of earth, call out all their names
yet you speak of resilience as if we can win
there are things that make me sink back into the grave
inside Plato’s cave, where moving shadows are safe

paper crown

a cut-out crown is still a crown
for a girl on a stolen horse
I would have swapped our sanities
to see her hair become lost in
rose horizons, saddlebags filled
with boxes of chocolate sprinkles

I’d been chasing robber children
long before we met – and I will
stick with this selfish travelling
until or well beyond my death
but she – she bore whole galaxies
sprinkled into maps on her skin

in my inside pocket you’ll find
scissors, tape and golden paper
the day I borrowed her reindeer
I thought in time she’d ride my horse
instead I stop at roadside shrines
and eat chocolate sprinkles daily

robber child: arguably the most interesting character in H.C. Andersen’s story The Snow Queen is the unnamed little robber girl

Krasokouloura

I should have made them milk
and bread, while they were still in bed –
instead, I impulsively fired up
the electric oven – as always, procrastinating –
to bake twenty ring-shaped Greek cookies
with things lying around the cupboard.

Flour, sugar, baking powder, cinnamon,
salt, ground cloves, some olive oil
and another glass of white wine.

I should have written them a note,
but I’m that cat; as always, capitulating
to curiosity – I had to taste one, still warm,
curled up on the windowsill – new sun,
please, tell me what skills it would take
to achieve immaculate roundness.

Biography:
Cecile Bol is a Dutch writer with a small family and a big edible garden in the north of the Netherlands. She doesn’t have an MA in Creative Writing, because things like that don’t exist in her country. She does, however, earn her money as a self-employed copywriter. The somewhat well-known poet Helen Ivory describes Cecile’s work as ‘like finding snakes in your strawberry patch’. Cecile enjoys incorporating fairy tales and popular culture in her poetry, and her poems often have a slight erotic edge. Cooking (mostly Greek) food is her means of meditation. Cecile owns 57 different kinds of herbs and spices of which cumin and dill are her favourites.

Cecile’s debut chapbook Fold me a Fishtail was published by UK-based Selcouth Station Press in 2022 (Sadly, Selcouth Station Press ceased to be in 2023). So what’s Fold me a Fishtail about? Cecile: “I sometimes wonder whether Disney’s Ariel misses her mermaid tail, now that she’s the legged wife of prince Eric. Isn’t she way too curious and free-spirited for a conventional family life? Or is that just me? That feeling chained to a husband, toddler and suburban lifestyle was enough to drive me dangerously crazy? Fold me a Fishtail is a collection of mostly confessional poetry about a long journey into, through and out of (?) the dark.”