Let's Go Out



Finally the time had come. This was the day we would go out and explore the yeast fields. The weather was lovely and we were happy to escape our clay-growing pale paddock for a while. The summer cross guided us on the first stage of our journey, that took us along the lily brook. We didn’t speak a lot, but enjoyed field glint and roe light while the morning was still young. Nobody ran into us, we were only greeted by the occasional pebble-sheep.

(chorus , sung:)

Let’s go out, let’s go out
Zoyèhoomee manumeo
Daydabokee mazmèkao
Let’s go out, let’s go out.

By now the sun stood high in the sky. We had passed the clover border and arrived in upperland. Deer calm made us whisper. Carefully we went through a prowling pasture full of rosegrin and ravenhorn. No earglimpse yet of the yondercock, which of course only awakes with later moon. Softly a meander rabbit rustled off in front of us. Was it just quiet or was this misquiet? Was that a fog hen shooting into that copse?

(chorus)

Something’s wrong. Phantom spring was veering round and we had no mist guide. We thought we’d taken a thoroughlane, but it must have been a hook road or a circlepath that with a netherbend led us through slant grass into this mortal vale. Could this be wildside, where the turnboar roams? – A gall grumble in the weed wood! The almavixen, or the smirk of the moorhound!

(chorus, in minor)

Lost. Saw the adjacent firmament, so at earth’s end. We will perish. But how? In the witherstream, by hillfire in writhe dusk, by moss lightning and thundermole? From winter prickle?




Original Title: Er Op Uit
From: Jaap Blonk,‘Liederen uit de Hemel’ (‘Songs From Heaven’), Poëzie Perdu 4, Amsterdam 1993
Translation: Willem Groenewegen


Live recording at SoundEye, St. Finn Barr's Cathedral, Cork, Ireland, July 11, 2009