Ode to Remco Campert

Ode to Remco Campert

A film clip from the nineteen-fifties
Awoke the faded hues of memory:
A farmer in blue smock and wooden clogs,
And women crowding in their village dress.

The poet may with wistfulness sing of the past,
A gadfly in the fur of bourgeois decorum,
For with the Now in all its squalor
He can do but little.
“Poetry is the affirmation of things.”

History written, made visible—
With light-foot steps he nears his hundredth year.
The shelf life nearly reached.
A little dazed, though not quite overwhelmed,
He lingers on—somewhat withdrawn—
And by admirers almost deified.

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