The Song of Anna the MermaidHet Lied van Zeemeermin AnnaThe Song of Anna the Mermaid

This book is not a monument of perfection but a vessel of becoming. Every poem within it was written as part of my own pilgrimage through language—an act of learning, of reaching, of trying to find truth. English is both my craft and my classroom. I am still a student of its vastness—its shifting grammar, its hidden roots, its capacity to wound and to heal. Each line you will read is born from that ongoing study: a bridge between the words I already knew and those I met along the way.

A Journey Through Language

To write these poems was to wander through libraries of light and shadow. I found myself standing before the old echoes of both the Elizabethan and Old English (Anglo-Saxon) tongues—two streams of the same ancient river. Their words—thou, thy, ūre, nāwiht—felt carved in the bone of the language, carrying a gravity that bends even modern breath towards reverence. I let that weight draw through my voice until it forged its own fusion: a cadence where Germanic root meets Elizabethan grace. From there I turned to the clarity of modern lyric, sharp as breath of confession, and to the stillness of Japanese forms, where silence itself becomes a stanza, and absence a kind of ink.

United by Trial

What unites these voices is not their time or style, but their trial—the journey through the dark corridors of grief, rage, and memory towards the fragile light of love, redemption, and purpose. Some poems speak of the world's cruelty; others speak of tenderness as its quiet revolt. Together, they form an atlas of both the human wound and the will to heal it.