A poem by the Dutch poet Willem Jan Otten

ON THE THEFT OF TIME

Why else have you, reading,

ended up here of all places

from where you were before

unless to discover

from someone other than yourself

that every one of the fifty eggs

which agnostic Grandpa Otten

once collected and sucked

a century ago

and laid to rest in a

sky-blue set of drawers,

in time bequeathed to me,

that every one of the fifty eggs,

that of the linnet, too,

small as a little finger,

freckled with ochre,

will, in these very lines,

be gently feathered as in

their nest of former times

and, in your reading, hatched?