…and we shall go to have coffee in Delft,

early in the morning, when the sky has

clear colours from Master Vermeer’s canvas

and his women make noise with buckets

and open dusty stained-glass windows

We shall drink coffee with a view to a harbor,

and slightly tremble putting away fragile china

with blue birds more than three hundreds years old.

The shadows will dissolve from

tenement houses and only cats will be

basking in the sun on the flagstones,

peeping from time to time at the place

where there is nothing except the transient

sparkle of the sun, as if reflected

in the pearl earring…

17 January 2006

Johannes Vermeer “View on Delft” (1660-1661)