Cornelis
owned the smallest farm in Loosduinen

next to The Hague, now swallowed up

had my grandmother, his daughter,

walk the goat to the Malienveld

and graze it

she walking it through the city on a leash

once slaughtered a goat

maybe the same one

because it ate a ten guilder bill

killed it

and retrieved the money from its stomach

the bill worth more than the goat

drank his piss in the morning

but made my grandmother eat

from separate dishes

when on her period

died shortly after his wife

from a broken heart

having lived through two world wars

and the hunger winter
August
owned a plantation in Java, Dutch Indies

growing kapok

hunted tigers and other big game

bought new cars with cash

knocked up one of his planter girls

decades his junior

his daughter born in the kampung

until at age seven

when his mother found out

he formally acknowledged her,

a Dutch legal requirement,

retrieved her to live with him

her mother as well

whom he did not marry until

Indonesian independence was a fact

now or tomorrow

so he could take her with him to cold cold Holland

where she grew smaller until she disappeared completely

once hit my brother

a story oft repeated

my father, my mother telling him to never do that again

the felling of a giant who

just before the Japanese came

lent a friend ten thousand guilders

a veritable fortune

he saw neither friend nor money ever again

leaving the young republic broke

his possessions fitting in a few crates

after years in a camp during the war

to cold cold Holland

the mother country he had never seen

plummeting down the class-system

like it had no bottom

cold-shouldered by post-war Netherlands

which got rich of people like him

a nuisance

a painful reminder

of an inconvenient past

died unacknowledged without thanks