A poem by the Dutch poet Martinus Nijhoff

THE CLOUDS

I still wore boy’s clothes and lay side by side

Outstretched with mother in the heath’s warm lair;

Above us shifting clouds were drifting by

And mother asked me what I saw up there.

And I cried: Scandinavia, and: swans,

A lady, and: a shepherd with his sheep –

The wonders were made word and drifted on,

But I saw mother, smiling, start to weep.

Then came the time I kept the earth in sight,

Although up in the sky the clouds were rife;

I did not seek to try to catch in flight

The strange thing’s shadow as it grazed my life.

- Now on the heath my lad lies next to me

And points out what in new clouds he can spy;

I’m crying now, for far off I can see

The distant clouds that made my mother cry -