Friday 4 March 2016

A poem by the Dutch writer Serge van Duijnhoven

BELLUM TRANSIT

Love is a delicate, an injured cub
that plays and claws and climbs and tirelessly
in sun and rain keeps searching for its mirror image
among the tangled scrub of loneliness.

This world will change, shrinking and grey
but many caterpillars will weave many butterflies.
Cubs grow up into lions or lionesses
and tears in spite of all eventually wed

their laugh. All flesh is but as ashes
to the worms. And a human’s nothing
more or nothing less than a princess
or a king, formerly sometimes foolish

or degenerate. What passes is called war
what lasts is love. Nature withstands
the longest with her Breath, for she
unites both forces in her battlefields

of future and time past. Our heart
is but a burning at the end
of that slender bottleneck of mother
goose: this universe.

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