(Vertaling / Translation) Pat Boran Tears I like to cry I like to cry so much first thing I did when I was born was cry cry up a storm, cry up two small torrents two strong currents. The world slapped me as a signal to begin so I began as I determined to continue with tears. All through my childhood years I cried, sometimes howling my release my relief my glad return to the vale of tears. Right up until the time the hormones came out of hiding out of waiting and began their slow tour of my body tears came easily. In my teens they stopped. My tears went underground like the small streams I played in as a boy before the town grew up. I knew they were there. I felt their pull, their attraction, but found neither spring nor river mouth where they might whisper back to the greater rhythm of ocean, the ocean of tears. No tears for instance at seventeen where there was more to cry about than I could explain, and far too few in recent years when the brightest light in the night sky began to fade. But now I'm always close to tears, at home with tears, and not only my own but yours, my love. I see or hear or somehow sense that hot swell as I cross a room and pass a stranger in the street as if all eyes were forcing me to recognise something in the air. And I have seen myself in the future, prepared to move on, move out of the way, the room, through doors maybe but back to a place where tears are rolling down my face as the world lifts its hands from my flesh and I am lighter, light again, and the sound of that original slap runs backwards before all is still again, all is quiet again and my eyes sit still in my skull again only salt now, dry salt now where once there were, I'm glad to say, my tears.           © Pat Boran