All Those Vanished Names...

TEKST

vrijdag 3 oktober 2025 om 11:30 uur.    |    Terug naar Proza
Dit werk werd reeds 25 maal bekeken.

These five words keep running through my mind.Every morning before the early service known as Lauds, I visit the romantic churchyard of St George’s. Every morning before Lauds I stand in the same place, absorbing the unspoiled view of Brede Valley. Every morning I take a photo, always the same one.

Time and again, I’m overcome by a lyrical melancholy, harking back to a time when the early deciphering began, a time that demanded nothing but the gold of simplicity: the velvety sheet of morning dew around plums, Sansevierias on my grandmother’s window sill, clear skies, croaking frogs, freshly mown hay, the resinous scent of spruce trees, the rustling wind in my tousled hair. Shopping in a sweet shop full of limitless possibilities, the imprints of horseshoes in the loose earth, amazement, the scrapes after a tumble, sweat like congealing candle wax on my forehead, moaning, the streaks of sorrow my mother kissed, pinches of tenderness…

William Wordsworth famously wrote that ‘The child is the father of the man’. Memories of our childhood are the very essence of the adults we’ve become. In all its simplicity, this poem, with its unsurpassed eloquence and joy, is a monument to those memories.

But in the past silence reigns. Few poets have been able to give the dead a voice. W .B. Yeats is one of them. In ‘Memory’ he writes these unforgettable words:

One had a lovely face

And two or three had charm,

But charm and face were in vain

Because the mountain grass

Cannot but keep the form

Where the mountain hare has lain.

Frank De Vos