On 25 January (sweat?) Lieke Marsman retired as Poet Laureate after two years of loyal service. Her successor, no one knows who, canceled at the last minute due to personal circumstances. Since then, four weeks now, the State of the Netherlands has been without an official poet.
You notice it in everything. Rain that previously tapped softly or poured down from the sky in buckets at the same time, now falls soullessly like colorless hail of tears (sprinkles, fruit hail, hail of tears) from the sky. Or no, not like hail of tears, it just falls, like the letters and numbers of an excel file of which someone has opened the bottom line of the bottom row. Or no, not like anything. The rain falls. No more.
Nobody sleeps well anymore, because nobody sleeps like babies. People walk down the street with their souls under their arms, but if you look closely they are carrying nothing, only some dark sky. Schiphol is expanding, but no plane wants to take off anymore. They remain glum in their warm hangars. Or no, of course planes don’t look, they just stand, without passengers in their bellies, but planes don’t have bellies. Children’s books suddenly seem duller overnight, traffic lights shift from gray to gray to grey, both natural ice and butterflies decide that it is neither winter nor spring, the newspaper only counts half a sentence: everything is …
I have argued before for more poets in the House of Representatives. And if that is not possible, then perhaps in the cabinet. A poet as the minister of Rijkswaterstaat, resulting in beautiful long linden avenues instead of widening the motorway again. A poet on Justice, who says ‘sixteen years in prison, for not knowing Remco Campert by heart!’ The poet of Volkshuisvesting presents poems, people can easily live in them. An office worker who has to call a friendly head of state because the prime minister left this morning, it was still dark, to watch the sunrise and has not yet returned. Whether the friendly head of state can drive to a roadside just outside The Hague instead of to the Torentje? The prime minister is lying there among daisies, she is writing a sonnet there.
Unfortunately, there are doctors and lawyers in the cabinet, a former panzer howitzer commander and a former owner of ten bakery shops, but a poet is too much to ask. Even the only poet who worked for the State of the Netherlands was allowed to work, so we would be lost without a Poet Laureate. So we are lost ourselves. It is cold and ugly in the Netherlands.
Last week I read in a book about a street sweeper in Hanover who cleaned a hard-to-reach corner of the city every morning with a broom and brush, and one day found a ring with diamonds. That can’t happen here anymore. From all sides the whooshing sound of blindly spinning municipal rag brushes gallops towards me. Or no, I just hear them.