Saturday a gorgeous, warm day, blue skies, fleecy white clouds. Bushes are beginning to green and I found these trees and hedges in bloom. I gather the one on the far left to be  Mimosa and the one on the right some kind of May Thorn? Correct me if I’m wrong. Today another fine day with the Magnolias trying to hold on to their closed status with all their might but it won’t last long. Everywhere Glory-of-the Snow in abundance. I need to become more clever with moving the pics around but you get the idea!Then, on Saturday afternoon I was engaged in writing about peoples and their land and what constitutes a people’s identity and came upon the lines written on a memorial wall in a small park in Amsterdam.  I walk by it every day when I visit there and hope to do so in a few weeks.

The park is called after H.M. van Randwijk who penned the lines put in large letters on the wall of the park. 

The poem is about tyranny and the three lines chiseled on the wall loosely translated read: A people that yields to tyrants will lose more than life and property, for then its light dies. For the Dutch speakers among you:

Een volk dat voor tyrannen zwicht

zal meer dan lijf en goed verliezen

dan dooft het licht.

The memorial wall stands at the location where on March 12, 1945, about a month before the war ended in The Netherlands, 30 members of the Dutch underground were executed.

Van Randwijk was something else.Editor and founder of the daily newspaper Vrij Nederland during World War II, member of the Dutch underground, incarcerated several times, bluffing his way out of the hands of the Nazis., journalist and poet.  A force to be reckoned with and not one to bow to tyranny.  May his memory be for a blessing.