Van Loon (englisch) Songtext / Lyric

Van Loon
A Song for the late Hendrik Willem van Loon

I daresay Van Loon was a man whose destiny should have been working hard
Albeit his shoulders and his intelligence could not bear all that;
He seemed to have been kiss’d by his lucky star
When he had to go away;
He’s never gone down into history, we know,
But it’s easy to be wise after the event
But nobody has ever ask’d an eagle
Or a mouse to make a choice;
Then, one certain day marks one’s future
Or a war breaks the glass like a stone...
But I’ve seen mice roaring sometimes
And other times eagles falling down.

How many years we’ve to live together with somebody, day after day,
To understand what he’s got in his mind, what he wants or who he is,
Explorers of void, of anybody
Who’s not I or myself;
Van Loon was alive, yet I believed he was dead
Or worse than ever, useless owing to the distance
Between his many myths and the proudness of my youth days
And my ignorance;
I didn’t know how much he had been sailing
O’er the foamy main like Sebastian Cabot
And that a whalefish had been becoming
Day after day a sweetwater fish...

Van Loon, Van Loon
Tell me what is your burden when your mind
Keeps quiet and finally lets you be,
Do you cherish a shadow, or is peace
Inside you?
I’d like to know
What are you seeing when you look around,
Are they distant sights or are you pleas’d
With this daylight like a new gift
To you?

Van Loon, Van Loon
What are you thinking in the september mist
Sketching here and there the Appennines
Now that you have so much time for thinking,
But of what?
Go, old man, go
Anybody’s his own reasons, don’t be afraid,
And his own rights to do anything
Even tho’ we’ll never know what...

Now Van Loon’s preparing his last journey
He’s already packed like any far-seeing man,
The usual luggage of any simple or wise man
So very little, or nothing
He’ll really go down to his own place or his own history
With all the books that he could not write in his life
And with old friends long lost in his memories,
With infinite
To an everlasting summer, be it even on our mountains,
But, if he wants, even to that untroubled winter
When the frozen snow crunched under his hobnailed
Boots, when he was eighteen.