Amsterdam and its poets

There is a dike of silence,

a wall of smoke on the rain today

in the Netherlands.

I'm on the other side of the Ocean,

I still remember you…

my little muse from the North,

my dear Amsterdam.

When I toured your narrow streets

near the Oude Kerk,

you rejoiced me with oblong windows,

with your naive elegance of ancient city

and those floating houses with flowers.

Your buildings, big reeds swaying in the time,

protected me from the coldness of the moderns.

You gave me company.

You gave to my brothers, the swans;

you procreated them so I would not feel alone.

I wandered with them with all my poetry,

swimming on elegant white feathers,

and traveled with our closed eyes

along your channels.

 

I found love in Spring,

or in the invernal ice of the Amstel.

I traversed your countless veins,

frosty of dreams and navigators.

This, I tell you, my dear Amsterdam,

to realize yourself that this life without poets

it´s nothing more than a birth and death of cells

on boats and bicycles.

 

Life without poets is nothing more

than a ship of old wood sailing in the void.

Worship not only the brush of Vincent

and Rembrandt; worship the verses of

Joost van den Vondel.

This life without the poets' prized voice

becomes a little fistful of dust,

a field of black tulips, forgotten,

with no one who sings to them

so they can dance again under the sun.

I will walk barefoot on your northern beaches

again, dear Amsterdam

your daughters will hug me as they used to do

and I will make a deal again with the Sea.