Time marches on
Things change while they stay the same in this issue of your weekly dose of poetry
We just had
Velib' then; this building,
it seems new; Eric Kayser is still
here. The park, of course, too.
And I? Changed.
We returned to the greater Paris area after about a decade. The first time we lived within the city’s boundaries as defined by the hectic Boulevard Périphérique. Now, we live well outside these boundaries, close to the penultimate stop of the regional train network. Close enough to the city to pop in once in a while.
I’ve been back to our old neighbourhood a couple of times. Even though Paris immediately felt like home when we moved there, it now no longer really is. I feel like a visitor in the park we treated as our backyard then. Still, it’s nice to walk there and see how much has changed while everything at the same time stayed the same.
We had moved back to a place we had lived before, before we did that this time. When we moved back to The Netherlands after almost a decade of living abroad. This was, by some distance, the most difficult move we have made. Somehow people think you have come home, so all is good now. But in 10 years, much stays the same, but much more changes. In very obvious and visible ways, such as new roads, new buildings, and offices where once cows grazed. Also, though, in less obvious ways. The way people think, the way modern technology is implemented, the way the real estate market works. Things have happened that have been ingrained in the national memory, but of which you are not aware. Because you have changed as well, living in three different countries. Your frame of reference has developed in a totally different way than the one of the people you now live amongst. Yet, these are ‘your people’, you are ‘home’ now, so everybody expects you to be like them.
And you’re not.
Of course, with time, you find a way to be part of this new old place and make it part of you. And then grow again. With time. Sometimes a bit more than others.
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Poetry elsewhere
I like change, and I thin we should embrace it. But we should not blindly run into the next big thing. Explore it, discover how it can add value to our lives, and ask the right questions. Specifically that last bit, asking the right questions, is something poets are very well positioned to do.
proves precisely that with this poem Heat:Earlier this week I took part in an online workshop, creating some poetry using not only improv techniques, but also my very own poetic form, the tritriplicata. Chris, who initiated the workshop, did another one a day later, and will probably do several more. The poem of the second workshop was really nice. Enjoy Build on Cheesecake:
Sometimes observing the world to write poetry about what you see helps in making sense of it all. Especially if you take one object, or word, and try to write different poems about it. This works especially well with short forms such as my tritriplicata, or, of course, the haiku.
shows this exceptionally well in the poems in this post Haiku as Emotional Discovery:
Yes, we were five brothers in 7 years time, all born '52-'59, each of us quite different and having reacted differently to our various places we lived.
Thanks for the mention!