Poetic President
The Brussels rumour mill suggests the smart money for European President is going on Belgian PM Herman Van Rompuy.
He's got his own blog, but rather than discussing the finer points of the European Directive on Animal By-Products, he uses it to post his own haikus.
The latest seems to be a reference to the race for the presidency.
Drie golven rollen
Samen de haven binnen
Het trio is thuis
which means:
Three waves are rolling
Together to the port
The trio is at home
The Financial Times, clearly the journal of choice for aspring poets, says this is a reference to the interaction between the president of the European Commission, the foreign policy supremo and the future EU president.
There are precedents for poetic presidents. Angola's first leader, Agostinho Neto wrote poems, some of them transformed into liberation anthems. And when Senegal's first president, Léopold Senghor died in 2001, Jacques Chirac remarked: "Poetry has lost one of its masters". Meanwhile, Portugal's 1915 leader, Teófilo Braga wrote a work called Visão dos Tempos (1864; “Vision of the Ages”) that was inspired by Victor Hugo’s Légende des siècles.
So why not a poet for President? Perhaps he could make even the Common Agricultural Policy sound interesting.