Friday 9 May 2014

This Sunday's poem in the Van Oorschot calendar is by Dèr Mouw


Young lovely, who with cool-white bridal gown
would much like to deny the sultry glow
that darkly makes her slimness shimmer so,
eyes sparkle, and hair form a gleaming crown,

she feels as if she goes now, one elect,
she she alone, to meet sheer Happiness:
her own house, husband handsome to excess,
in word and deed so noble, so perfect –

Already I see a tired face, greying hair;
the memory of a paradise, once fair
now lost, is in her eyes a listless gleam:

life threw her out, a flat-flailed sheaf of corn;
a docile drudge, dulled by the brood she’s borne,
with sagging belly, bourgeois, broad of beam.

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