Am spending the weekend at the Utrecht appartment of our eldest girl, she being engaged in helping move a friend to Berlin. It was lovely to take morning walks in the old town, where she lives. First one yesterday – an unnaturally quiet Saturday morning, as Covid restrictons meant only food stores were open, and parcel delivery companies owned the town. The second just now, on a naturally quiet Sunday morning where we met with the odd walker or cyclist, and apart from the one street sweeper that made motorized noise everything was quiet.

Came across a poem today that gave me the perfect example of how one can create space with words. I’ll translate it from the Dutch (see image):

Put the blue
from the sea
against the
blue of the
sky sweep
the white
of a sail
in and the
wind rises

The beauty of it is that with a very few words the poet created a real space – the word ‘sweep’ in ‘sweep the white of a sail’ engendering the word ‘rises’ in ‘the wind rises’. And the 24 words of the poem creating a real space in the mind. Beautiful!