EVERY DAY
Every day is a different day.
I tell myself this, to give myself courage.
I’ll return to writing – poetry of an eighty-year old.
No disgrace, you do what you can.
Like Goya’s painting of the dog. Drowning or swimming?
Or just keeping abreast,
never mind the giant wave looming.
I’m sitting on the Haarlemmerplein in the June sun.
There are children bobbing and weaving between the fountain jets
or tilting their faces upward
to let the water explode over them.
I bend over my notebook, putting my trust in words
as a swimmer does in the sea, a new poem:
‘Love is the door and love the key’.
Heaven knows what my second line will be.