https://www.theguardian.com/education/2023/jun/16/george-washington-university-professor-antisemitism-palestine-dc

https://www.poetryfoundation.org/poets/gerard-manley-hopkins

Without your love, I’m nobody I know.
Our inter-self, dismembered, broke apart
Give me courage on the journey slow

In good time , we lose our self in flow
To be self-conscious makes shame rule the heart
Without your love, I’m nobody I know.

Do we have no self when partners die?
Bewildered, can I find the way to start?
Give me courage on the journey slow

Where is my best path to discover
The way to mend a self, holed by grief’s darts?
Without your gaze, I’m nobody I know

Like a ship strikes rocks deep down below
I risk getting hit without some charts
Give me courage on the journey slow

Will I know myself when new betrothed
To mirrors unfamiliar to me old?
Without your love, I’m nobody I know.
Give me courage in the darkness gross.

Elena,a baby wrapped in woollen clothes.
On the last train,Warsaw to Moscow,
[ change Niegoreloje.]
1939.Father,mother,brother
You passed through the Arctic Wastes of life.
Still as if travelling on a train
To an impossibly far destination.
As you left the German Army crashed into Warsaw
Lost,your aunts
Your cousins.
Your culture.
How does God select the damned?
You had your own baby,here in England,
Not lost like all those others.
Your father died by his own hand,
The hand of history;
The fingers twitching,
Not sure where to point.
Then settling into frozen grief
A sculpture only your mother saw.
You saw too,Elena.
You always saw,though you can’t remember;
The long journey, your mother’s breast,
Your father’s silence.
Only the dead know that silence.
Only the dead weep
With the rocks and stones .
And the ice in each eye
Fell like snow down your cheeks
As you held your own infant.
Warsaw to Moscow,
Moscow to Jerusalem.
Always journeying
Looking for what they can never find:
The home they left behind
The presence of the dead
Lying in gaunt heaps
Like rubbish
Your aunts, Elena.
Your cousins.
You never knew them.
But there’s a hole in your mind
Through which the Polish wind forever blow

Love

When first I saw your soulful face,
Then wished I most to you embrace.
I wished as well to clothe you in
The sacred images within.

To find a home for love without;
To fold my dreams all round about
Your loving body and your face
Were covered in such joy and grace.

But now my dreams are cast aside
The world of meaning denied life.
What seemed most precious now is fled…
And I lie sleepless in my bed.

What is the world when unadorned
With all that in my heart I’ve formed?
There is no meaning I can trace.
As in a mother’s empty face.

On these grey rocks my path is hard.
From paradise, my self is barred.
To struggle or to grief succumb
When this dark day of mourning’s done?

Into His dazzling darkness dart
My dreams and love like dying sparks.
Into His Mystery now so fair
I’ll cast both hope and my despair.

Thus my dreams will be transformed
To show themselves in other forms.
What feels a loss may foretell growth.
On my hope,I’ll take an oath

That nothing in my life is waste,
That I have not for phantasms chased.
And you are human,as am I.
Let’s live again until we die

So my copse has ripened to a wood
How many living creatures dwell within?
The shades of green, the sunshine, and the Good

Once we had three apple trees,a glut
Today, too old to fruit, they stand there still
My copse has turned into a little wood

Neighbours hint that I get my trees cut
Yet these leaves of green make my heart full
The shades of green, the sun the wind ,the gods

Once we read there was a total Flood
Now we have the bush fires and their will
Still, my copse has turned into a wood

Trees have their green sap where we have blood
They will never wound, will never kill
The shades of green, the sun the wind ,the gods

Just like Eve and Adam we may sin
The maple waves away my mental pain
My copse has turned into my private wood
The shades of green, the long path.Come, my Love.