Article
Kicking off Tour de France 2015 with poetry
Cyclic verse
June 30, 2015
To join this ‘shadow peloton’ and to get into the spirit of the festivities, we in Rotterdam are featuring our international archive’s poems about the contest and art of biking. After all, as Christian Prudhomme, director of the Tour de France, claims: ‘in the Netherlands, the bicycle is king’.
Excerpts from the poems:
FABLES OF THE SACRED HEART, Dirk van Bastelaere (Belgium)
Those were days of cycling in the mountains. Of climbing, descending.
Of enormous hunger for more and as long as they blocked the peak’s
virginity from view in their groaning scent of resin,
pine trees acted out this problem to excess. But above the
treeline you feel free.
THE BICYCLE THIEF – VITTORIO DE SICA (1948), José Miguel Silva (Portugal)
500 miles per day pedaled my father, from his bed
near the Douro River to the booming ceramicware
plant of Valadares. If all men, from birth,
are given some sixty enemies per hour,
imagine a life cycling to and from a factory.
BICYCLE, Philip Hammial (Australia)
It’s my fifth birthday & I’m sitting on the present that Uncle Stan has just given me, a green Schwinn bicycle. He gives me a push & down I go, down the gentle slope in his back yard in Chicago that becomes a hill, an interminably long hill that, sixty years later, I’m still going down.
BICYCLES IN THE SIXTIES, Sun Wenbo (China)
In my youth—the Cultural Revolution—
the buses roaring through the streets
with Red Guards brandishing guns, tearing down the replicated
Imperial Dam. It was time to “Break the Four Olds”.
I remember leaving home for middle school
two miles away, and saw a young guard in glasses
raised his gun and started shooting porcelain vases
off the power poles.
JUNE ROCK, Yosuke Tanaka (Japan)
Evening in early summer, people are strolling about.
As I ride my bike out of the woods in the park
There’s a man walking in front of the drinking fountain.
Another young man goes down to the base of the bridge
Turns suddenly and goes back up the slope.
Seduced by the humid but pleasant evening breeze,
They’ve all gone outside to while away the time.
‘Dichten is fietsen op de Mont Ventoux’, writes the Dutch poet Jan Kal. ‘Writing poems is biking up the Mont Ventoux’. This week, on 4 July, 2015, the Tour de France launches from Utrecht, The Netherlands, which means the entire city, and much of the country, is now decked with yellow and red-and-white polka dots, biking paraphernalia, and even poetry.
The Utrecht Stadsdichtersgilde (City Poets Guild) recently published an anthology of poems tracking the race’s path through the city, called Schaduwpeloton (Shadow peloton; Magonia, 2015); and the city has adorned many of its residents’ bikes – the primary mode of transportation in the Netherland – with seat covers emblazoned with verse.To join this ‘shadow peloton’ and to get into the spirit of the festivities, we in Rotterdam are featuring our international archive’s poems about the contest and art of biking. After all, as Christian Prudhomme, director of the Tour de France, claims: ‘in the Netherlands, the bicycle is king’.
Excerpts from the poems:
FABLES OF THE SACRED HEART, Dirk van Bastelaere (Belgium)
Those were days of cycling in the mountains. Of climbing, descending.
Of enormous hunger for more and as long as they blocked the peak’s
virginity from view in their groaning scent of resin,
pine trees acted out this problem to excess. But above the
treeline you feel free.
THE BICYCLE THIEF – VITTORIO DE SICA (1948), José Miguel Silva (Portugal)
500 miles per day pedaled my father, from his bed
near the Douro River to the booming ceramicware
plant of Valadares. If all men, from birth,
are given some sixty enemies per hour,
imagine a life cycling to and from a factory.
BICYCLE, Philip Hammial (Australia)
It’s my fifth birthday & I’m sitting on the present that Uncle Stan has just given me, a green Schwinn bicycle. He gives me a push & down I go, down the gentle slope in his back yard in Chicago that becomes a hill, an interminably long hill that, sixty years later, I’m still going down.
BICYCLES IN THE SIXTIES, Sun Wenbo (China)
In my youth—the Cultural Revolution—
the buses roaring through the streets
with Red Guards brandishing guns, tearing down the replicated
Imperial Dam. It was time to “Break the Four Olds”.
I remember leaving home for middle school
two miles away, and saw a young guard in glasses
raised his gun and started shooting porcelain vases
off the power poles.
JUNE ROCK, Yosuke Tanaka (Japan)
Evening in early summer, people are strolling about.
As I ride my bike out of the woods in the park
There’s a man walking in front of the drinking fountain.
Another young man goes down to the base of the bridge
Turns suddenly and goes back up the slope.
Seduced by the humid but pleasant evening breeze,
They’ve all gone outside to while away the time.
© Mia You
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