Haags Hopje

Weekly fresh poetry, issue #100

Coffee, cream
and sugar. Leave, not on
purpose, on the heater for a night.
Innovation done with
open mind.

I love the story of the Haags Hopje. It is a candy with coffee flavour, invented in my home town, The Hague. It’s a story of accidental innovation, for which an open mind is necessary. It happened when Baron Hop left his coffee with cream and sugar on the heater in his lodging overnight. In the morning, it was thickened into a sweet hard mass. Of course, at this point, you can be disappointed. What you wanted, in this case keeping the coffee warm, did not work out. You could call it a failure. That is not what Baron Hop did. He simply tasted it. And discovered that it was actually delicious. Together with a baker who also specialised in confectionery, he perfected his discovery into the sweet coffee candy we know today as Haags Hopje.

What I take from this story is that it’s good to look at things from different angles. A failure might be a great new invention. An unfriendly person might be having a bad day. What is a weird activity for some, might be a beautiful ritual to others. Keep an open mind and you can bring beauty to the world.

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Special announcement: Voisegram delivers bedtime stories for children straight to your inbox. It’s part of the Wall O Books project, that brings stories to children who need them most. I am very proud to be part of that. And extremely happy with the amazing illustrations of my story of friendship by Abhishek Mitra. Read, subscribe and support this amazing project:

The Story of Andy

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Something to listen to

Have you listened to the latest episode of our podcast? It’s all about sonnets with James Maynard from And Now, A Sonnet.

Reena Kapoor, of Arrivals and Departures, is also recording poems. This one she shared a while ago, but it certainly is worth listening to:

And of course, there is this beautiful playlist for July:

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Poetry elsewhere

It is always good to create your own sparkle. Especially when it’s a rainbow. This poem by Suzanne Kiera Anthony is precisely about that: RAINBOW REVERIE.

RAINBOW REVERIE

Inspiration is everywhere and in anything. But it takes considerable skill to find it and write beautiful poetry from it. Rachel Rossos shows how to do it in this poem. Read parallelogram:

parallelogram

Look up and what do you see? Clouds can really ignite imagination. And inspire beautiful poems. Like this one by Katie Dozier. Read (and collect an edition of) this NFT poem The Clouds.