The Letters of Utrecht
De Letters van Utrecht

**One letter at a time, this never ending poem is being written on the streets of Utrecht. **

One letter per week, this poem is being written by a changing schedule of Utrecht’s Guild of Poets. This 21st century project is supposed to go into the 22nd, 22rd and so on. In 2012 is when the project started, but to make the start date the 1st of January 2000, they laid out 648 blocks for every week that has passed since this date.

• Every Saturday a stone mason pulls a stone from the border of the canal path, to inscribe a new letter.
• In this way, slowly a poem is appearing on the streets of Utrecht, but there is never a final poem: only the changing writer knows what the next letter will be.
• As the organisation, itself says: the poem will go on as long as there are Saturdays.

Currently, this is what the poem says, translated into English:

''You have to start somewhere to give the past a place, the present is getting less and less. The further you are, the better.

Go ahead now, Leave your tracks. Forget the flash in which you may exist, the world is your street plan.

Was there a time when you were another: it went by.

You are the other though.

You are, as you know, the spell of this story.

This is eternity. It takes. It’s time.

Therefore, go into your story and swallow. Tell.

Tell us who you are with each step.

In our story we disappear naturally, and only you remain in the long run.

You and these letters, which are cut out of stone.

Like the letters on our grave. They burst into the Dom.

Raised to the sky like an index finger, to indicate the guilty and demand more time.

So we can go up straight, like people along the canal.

Stare at their feet. Look up! See Utrecht’s churches protruding above ground level.

Raise the hands, begging with the towers to be this privilege: to be, now. The weather is nice. Stand on. Life is witness to your gaze on the horizon.

Your footsteps connect the past to the written letters.

All seasons recognize themselves in this unending city.

Here -the word- is quicksand. A heatwave settled on a frozen canal.

Rewind the cassette.

Take a distance backwards and look forward: the memory is a creeper and the time a dune.

Slowly animals crawl through the lea…*