To Belgium
Narrow streets of cobblestone
hem in slender brick red houses
presenting inscrutable door handles
useless without a key.
Sundays, shuttered to the world
villages seem deserted
dreaming, empty, waiting for
their flocks of Monday children to return at four o’clock,
weighted with book bags,
swooping into doorways for their afternoon tartines.
Discreet figures finger lace curtains.
They dip and peer and disappear
like shadows under water.
Belgium, cacophony of tongues,
French and Flemish, German and English,
bilingual street signs, too small to be read by any fleeting car.
Dialects dying, soon to be forgotten like Walloon steel,
rusting in the fields
where orange poppies bloom.
Belgium gourmand,
“A different beer for every day of the year,”
of moules et frites
(with mayonnaise, if you please.)
of craquelin and cramique--
tender breads whose crusts crunch like their names upon your tongue.
And chocolate!
Libation of the gods,
poured upon the altar of food at which the Belgians worship.
Baroque Belgium, sparkling like an Antwerp diamond,
steady as the dark rivers, the Meuse and Sambre,
bloody as the ruined farms at Waterloo, Ypres, Bastogne.
Canals wind past crumbling chateaux, the waters making moats,
reflecting pools under leaden skies.
Long, low banks of purple clouds, heavy with moisture
bump and crowd one another for position.
sullen, they scuttle away at dusk,
leaving streaks of peach and pink, turquoise and mauve
revealing the sun that was there all the time.
Tenacious Belgium,
intriguing as your dialects
comical as your Smurfs,
pompous as your Eurocrats--
While I stood, unawares, eyes agape--
at your dark, feudal dungeons,
at your cathedrals of stone lace,
at your gold sheeted Guild houses,
at your swirling Art Nouveau--
my tongue smoothed by chocolate,
my hands filled with bread,
unknowing and helpless to resist,
you filched my heart like a pickpocket does a tourist
in the Grand’ Place.
(Published on LanguageandCulture.net)
