Poets

Do you really mean to leave me, poetry at three thirty in the afternoon in the Rue du Four while above me the sky closes down

It's thawing on the Overtoom yet the frost's setting in again or so my feet tell me

I was sure that I was missing something but couldn't say what so I forgot about it as I walked down the street, at ease with the here and now in my Amsterdam never closed, open night and day. But the sense that I had been deprived of something crept up on me and filled me with yearning for something I felt I had lost: this building and the idea of it which hoarded the splendour of the past out of which our present is born every day. Without the past our present cannot hold, we are empty and without form, our existence, which endures longer than today, remains unsure. Of this endurance, stretching towards eternity this building was the symbol, but the entrance was barred, the door had closed to, and this city also, this land, this nation seemed no longer to open up, but was sealed off from its past. Now that I knew what I was missing the long wait could begin - ten years of slow days ten years of wakeful nights - till what was to come would be disclosed. But today, 13 April 2013, past and future are once more open and my old story can now be heard in a new spring and a new building, our country, our museum, the museum of our country, our Rijksmuseum.