Now Knowing This, Mother, A Legacy

Now, Knowing This

 

Now, knowing this

Shall we star gaze? Shall we

whisper into God’s ear?

 

If we have forgotten

our loveliness, He will show us

how to rediscover

forgotten pathways to our heart, 

 

how to stay

engaged in every moment

through wonderment of

bird’s feathers,

 

how to hear the flow of life

in the gurgling of a drain.

 

Mother

When I was born, you almost died.

Your eyes became blue diamonds,

brilliant in God’s intimacy. But you were

summoned by my father’s insistence,

for he had sustained immeasurable losses:

Hitler’s slaughter of family and race.

 

Before you died a second time, you asked

I leave. You feared I might recall you,

or just be a playful Zephyrus, who

could deflect your transcendence.

And before that, you asked I look after

your collection of pebbles, precious

and polished as traveler’s tales. These

rover’s out of whose gorges gyre

stories in lofty spires, are warp and weft

of hard-won continuity,

until time’s depredation ends them.

 

These pebbles, these transformers

of meaning, carry history! And you

have powers to turn time, becoming again

the child you left in your homeland.

 

When guilt undermined the self-respect 

of the master-race, you turned around

brutal betrayals, burnished pebbles

becoming your metaphor. You knew how

it was for them, your travellers, your sisters,

and carry their traces in private places

of pain and polished thankfulness.

 

 

A Legacy

 

My father escaped the holocaust carrying

a Leica and his talent for oils. Silver bromide

documented family history. Paintings,

farmers, factories, Berlin scenes,

and women as muses, in gutter and glory.

 

Like a bronze on a plinth, my father cut a figure

of unassailable magnificence. Some arrogance

rubbed off after portraying top-toads like Stalin.

It came as no surprise, that each year, miracles

of new canvasses filled halls in our Hampstead house

where my formative years trundled like miner’s trucks.

Collectively the family hefted loads, transmuting

base ore of post-war hardship into noble metal.

Parading brilliance and bluster in company,

and brooking no contradiction, he attempted

to recast his image out of the rubble of catastrophe.

 

His genius and mission were the engine that pulled us,

leaving the legacy of a truncated opus, art dealers

implementing a policy of neglect.

 

By Misha Norland