Frisian Thaw
by Martin Postma

The North Sea does not forget her ancient borders,
nor does the Frisian clay easily wash clean.
For eighty winters I have watched the grey mist rise
over the canals and fields of this low country,
carrying the same damp chill that rattled in our bones
when the black boots first broke the paddocks of our geldings and mares.

I was only a boy when the world went dark,
when our ancient refuge mounds were scarred with the iron of war.
They slaughtered our prized cattle in the mires,
and emptied the earthenware jars of our winter butter.
Our native tongue, choked out by the harsh commands of the garrison.

They took the sweet sugar-bread from my mother’s hearth,
but the deepest theft was at the end of a bayonet.
My brother, dragged through the farmyard muck,
forced at gunpoint into the dark of a Wehrmacht truck,
his clogs kicking against the tail board as it roared away,
leaving only the stench of diesel in the breath of our screams and the taste of our tears.

For eighty years, that cold iron stayed lodged deep in my chest.
I fed the anger daily, like a bitter peat-fire,
cursing the language spoken across the eastern border.
To me, they were always the wolves at the gate,
who crushed our sailing barges while moored, stood guard in our towns,
and turned our fertile marshes into staging grounds for ruin.

But the dykes hold back the sea, and time shifts even the deepest currents.
Now my weathered hands shake like dry reeds in the autumn wind.
I watch the tourists in the summer sun–
young families from Hamburg and Bremen, speaking that same, hated language,
but their voices are soft, their children laugh without malice,
skipping stones past the thickets where we once hid from their grandfathers.

They carry no blood on their hands, these bright children.
They cannot return what was stolen from our cupboards,
nor can they wake my brother from his unmarked grave.
It is an old ledger, written by ghosts long swallowed by the earth.
Perhaps I am the last foolish sentry guarding a now purposeless gate.

The weight of the hatred is heavier than the history.
It bends my spine lower than the coastal gales ever could.
Let the wind carry the smoke of that old inferno away.
Before the soil claims my bones, I will look across the flat earth
and see only neighbors, divided by nothing but a line,
and let my old heart finally fall still.



Author’s Note:

Friesland is the northwesternmost province in the Netherlands. The Frisian people cherish
and uphold a heritage, language, and culture distinct from the rest of the kingdom. During
the Second World War, Germany occupied the Netherlands and took advantage of the
agricultural and industrial resources of the country, as well as the forced labor of its
people. This poem is not an accounting of a particular person or family, but a repre-
sentation of the realities which Frisian people faced during this time. It speaks for
those who are no longer able.



 

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