Poetry - 2024/2025

What was your breaking point, dear Mother,

That told you that the pain of staying in Hitler’s Germany

Was greater than the pain of leaving?

What was that step too far, dear Ami,

That moved you to brave the cold winds of winter

And start your journey from Hungary to the United States?

When did life in Bulgaria become untenable, dear Emine,

And life in your ethnic homeland of Turkey

Offer the freedom you sought?

Home holds us longer than it should sometimes

As we balance the comfort of familiarity

With the harsh whip of those for whom

Power is everything

And human rights are no longer sacred

Before I ever crossed over from the rainbow world of the Bundesrepublik Deutschland, or BRD

(Bundes should have been Buntes, that is, colorful)

Better known as West Germany

To the black-and-white world of the Deutsche Demokratische Republik, or DDR

(Which was neither democratic nor representative)

Better known as East Germany

I heard the stories of my great-uncle Ernst, Oma’s brother,

Who lived in a city behind the Iron Curtain whose name I have forgotten

Having passed the age of 65, Onkel Ernst could travel to West Germany

Once a year for a month

To visit his sisters in Kiel

Twice I was visiting my Oma when Onkel Ernst arrived

He spoke openly of life in the DDR

Where stealth was a quickly learned asset

Where measuring one’s words was an essential skill

And where the innocence of children was regularly used against their families

It was against the backdrop of his stories that I traveled twice

With my parents from the land of color to the land of black and white

My mother had two dear friends who found themselves on the wrong side of the wall

Back in 1949 – one in East Berlin that necessitated trips through Checkpoint Charlie

And one in Dresden

Even on sunny days, everything in the DDR was drab and uninspired

Buildings only a few years old looked as though they had weathered a world war

They sat sadly without pride or spirit

Older buildings like the magnificent Zwinger in Dresden

Were left unattended in their bombed states

Unlike my mother’s friends, my parents and I were able to leave after our DDR visits

And return to a land of color

Thankfully today the walls are gone and Germany is one again

But the tyrannical impulse

Remains alive and well

Her bags had already been packed and taken away some months before

When her legs gave out

And she found herself in a hospital bed

What was left was a yearning to go home

To what little she still had

Before long, her memory was stripped bare

Save the occasional “I love you”

But in the end

Even “I love you”

Disappeared in a jumble of incoherent sounds

During our last visit, I chose not to massage her hands

With the rose lotion she previously enjoyed

Her hands were under the covers

And I was reluctant to pull them out

Instead, I massaged her scalp and spoke in a low voice

A gentle voice

About how much she had meant to us over the years

I will happily crawl into a den of lions

Or a cave of bears

Or perhaps a trapdoor spider’s tunnel

To breathe deeply the air of salvation

The unrelenting bomb raids

The othering of everyone to justify cruelty

The endless cycle of revenge

That is not the world I was ushered into

In which courage and kindness guided action

In which we still spoke of a moral compass

The lions will minister to me

The bears will comfort me

And the trapdoor spider will celebrate the living light

In all of us

Every dawn, when hope seems lost

And the days are littered with bad news

The sky envelops me in its endless beauty

As the sun and the clouds distract me with their lovely paintings

In shades of gray, white, blue, and orange

Slowly lifting the weights of sorrow

And replacing them with soft pillows of joy 

Her mother was fond of saying

We are all victims of life

When another friend or relative

Succumbed to disease or injury

She chuckled to herself

When she read in the obituaries

That a 90+ year old had died

But no cause of death was given

Of course not, she would say

She was old

She took in all in stride

The death and the dying

Until death went one step too far

And invited her on a fateful journey

In the guise of a vacation