‘Dear Madam, I don’t really know what to do with you,’ wrote the Flemish writer Herman de Coninck on 20 February 1991 to a certain Rozette Servaes. It is one of his empathetic letters in the collection A pleasant posthumousness from 2004, which I wrote about two days ago.
Rozette Servaes was a Sunday poet who, in his capacity as editor-in-chief of the New World Magazine some of her poems. ‘You make the mistakes that go with that,’ wrote De Coninck, ‘most of your poems rhyme too naively, are sympathetic because they are clumsy, not: because they are good, they are sometimes just clumsy.’
However, one single poem rises above all else, he thought. „‘Lommel’, about the soldier’s cemetery there. This should be made into a poster for every peace movement from now to the year 2100. That is not a poem by a poet – because he sits in an ivory tower forgetting what life is about – but by a housewife, who knows how much a kilo of sugar costs, and from which month the asparagus will become affordable again. And in that sober way she also knows how much a war costs. I think it is an exceptionally beautiful, moving poem.”
To be precise: in the Belgian municipality of Lommel is the German Military Cemetery, the largest Western European cemetery from WWII, where almost 40,000 German soldiers are buried.
De Coninck loved Sunday poets, at least their most beautiful poems, however rare. For example, he applauded the 1970s Sunday Poetry Festival in Amsterdam, in which writers such as Simon Carmiggelt and Remco Campert were involved. He wrote to Servaes: “If the ever more academic, ever more ethereal, ever more specialized poetry keeps out of touch with the square spontaneity of these Sunday poets, the whole poetry goes in the wrong direction. No: no way. Into the instant oblivion. ‘Lommel’, when I read it out loud, it always brings tears to my eyes.”
He praised Servaes as ‘a mother, such as I would like to have (although I estimate that we are about the same age) who accidentally, no, by luck, no, just because she is herself, about one beautiful poem a year. writes”.
De Coninck copied the poem ‘Lommel’ in his column in The morning and in his essay collection The blurb readingr. Was he exaggerating? Judge yourself.
There are no soldiers here
but boys who were good carpenters,
butchers, prophets and teachers.
They used to play football. Lying here
painters, window cleaners and dreamers.
They dreamed of owning their own cafe and
eatery to start. They used to take pennies
to their cafe, later their love
who now has to go alone.
Here are no soldiers but shepherds
and farmers, masons and very young ministers.
And bank clerks. shopkeepers, gardeners,
writers. And many fathers. From now and later.
Children of seventeen sleep here.
Shoulders and sweet cheekbones sleep here.
Maybe three real soldiers sleep here, maybe four.
A version of this article also appeared in the newspaper of September 2, 2022