HERITAGE

You wear the burden lightly, my son
of those who went before you:
Dutch and Jew,

masters of light and shadow,
fussers over fairness,
deft peddlers and cyclists and proud

of succeeding where Canute failed.
Tall farmers and soldiers, scholars and lawyers,
merchants and bankers and masons

who know what it means to be occupied,
to sweat and serve on spongy land without defense
or to have no land at all

but to bear with them, in peat hut or city,
the portable wisdom of those who have been displaced.
Hard-working and industrious people who build windmills,

not tilt at them; two small nations
scattered or squeezed between empires,
the domestic sphere the only safe harbour,

strewn with children, tulips and books,
maneuvering carefully through the narrow straits of civilization
like a rolled up torah or canal boat.

© Daniel Goodwin