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.