Elegy Poem by Maurice Gilliams

Sunday in the country.
Smoking, staring through the window:
linden trees outside,
idle boys are passing by.

Summer night in the fields
and listening to the far-away trains.
Canals that taste of nostalgia,
vistas, bells that trouble me
come and steal the honey from my heart.
And the towns I want to travel through,
where the brides are living,
where the ships sail the rivers,
call me in the falling dark:
in the wheat fields is a house.

But I linger at this window
of a country room
where a chair draws silence
and the flowers brown and wither
in a glass of green water.

Translated by Marian de Vooght