Home sweet home
This is the place that inhabits me, the place I left that never left me.
Vienna – city I never knew except in stories I grew up with in a far different place.
This is the place I write about over and over each poem different and all the same.
We all have our themes, our subjects and, Vienna, I’m stuck with you: a Vienna distorted through family fables and folk tales , whipped cream and frothy Strauss waltzes.
How much better everything was. A good life – such a good life – everything was above average
until it wasn’t. It’s that Vienna that inhabits me now, when march time replaced three-quarter time, the good life became
a frightening life
and then no life at all.
2014
Mother tongue
I was born after the war to end all wars and before the one that followed,
born into personal comfort and general insecurity
though every Viennese Jew knew we wouldn’t be touched.
But we were.
On the little ship crossing the big ocean we smiled at each other.
My mother said: This is how it feels to be not dead.
I teetered on the edge of old language and new.
I learned the new,
almost forgot the old.
School, Girl Scouts, college and marriage happened.
Children came, grew up, left.
My fluency in the new language erased the old
but left an emptiness.
In this country, after 75 years I am reclaiming the space where my mother tongue lived.
2013
History entered my house after my mother died. Here, she said, these are yours now, dumping a mess of papers and photos on my already-burdened desk: half drawn family trees, faded photos of faces vaguely familiar or not at all.
History took over my life abetted by the internet. Names from childhood became people with stories: stories of a way of life stories of camps and death stories of survival in England and Wales, France and Australia.
When history entered my house she made the globe smaller, and expanded my world.
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