#29 - a wretch like me

29^th January, 2020

29

a wretch like me

I keep a box of faraway

for long ago

where you have me

that’s where I keep

call brightness by letters

and numbers, a guess

who was I once when we were so

or half of me at least?

whom I never met or saw

this picture of you when

always another side of the family

someone disowned, forgot

so many stories till the truth

a secret tells itself

my eye a window open

requires another colour

the unforgiveable – cross to bear

to dance is all the body

imagine – touch and touch

you’re there

a little box of faraway

and where we’ll keep

is it for good – voices

never heard, languages unknown

names pile up for the dead

now forget them

like stars then measure for time

we go back a long way

all those tribes no longer wishing

and just the one was me  

who was I once when we were so?

look in the mirror, wonder

how love makes foolish too

tobacco tin or biscuit

old trunk of the voyage in rust

it only took a generation

for nation to betray

there was no imagining

pogroms – call them something else

but someone got away

that’s when you were with me

thousands of years we were

in the book and out of it

burden of each soil

a wretch like me, bright shining

and someone in a muddy trench

someone up against a wall

imagine the funny accents

what dangerous strangers we must have been

and then the not remembering

telling so much but not, escape

with this skin or leave it behind?

I saw the rabbit again

the rabbit from my mother’s dream

it was her waking end, real as

did she remember her mother’s once?

and so on, back … I sat in her lap

on sunshone steps over the harbour

spun on, the way a fish must swim

and all their silence mine

who was I once when we were so?

look in the mirror, wonder