Tuesday 9 March 2010

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?

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