DUTCH GOLDEN AGE

Calvinist piety made the Dutch churches bare

and the bourgeois merchant fat and smug

in his ample black clothes on the canvas;

he had made himself the saint

of the new Protestant age

and as patron paid for his own adoration.

No longer he had to kneel

pious in one corner and pray

for some obscure martyr massacred

he barely knew where;

now the brush worked whole for him

- as long as the far-sailing

ships of East Indies and the Caribbean

didn't sink. Even when all was pre-ordained

fate still played dice.

01.06.2019