The Never-Ending Poem of Utrecht

A poem that never ends sounds like something a slightly obsessive poet would dream up at three in the morning. But here on the Oudegracht, that dream is literally embedded in the ground beside the Smeebrug. Look down and you'll see more than a hundred metres of small pebbles forming letters, words, lines of verse stretching along the canal.

Ingmar Heytze and Michael Makers came up with this idea: a permanent artwork that never stops growing. Every Saturday, someone adds a new letter. Not a word, not a stanza. One letter. That's the pace, slow and deliberate, like the canal itself. So far, more than 1,100 letters have been placed, and if the tradition holds, the poem will eventually reach the Ledig Erf around the year 2080.

It's an ode to Utrecht and everyone who calls this city home, weaving together past, present, and future in one long, unhurried sentence. The poem doesn't care about algorithms or deadlines. It just grows.

Which means somewhere out there, a person has already been born who will read the finished poem. They just don't know it yet.