You remember when we had no place of refuge

Even when they cast us to the waves

Roiling seas swallowed us, like Jonah

Under the stormy fathoms until

Shielded by the Almighty

And incarcerated in the whale

Leviathan by name, he lived

And was ejected on the desiccated shore

You call Iraq, which was Babylonia

Ionah the dove, son of Amittai

Maddened by salt, sun and prophecy

Our dance is turned into mourning

But that is not the worst of it

Although the dancers fill our dreams

Running, hiding, sheltering

And the survivors promise

‘We shall dance again,’

We, who danced long ago,

Do not expect more dancing

There is always more mourning

And I am too old to dance.

Our cities sit solitary among the headlines

Of the BBC, CNN, Sky News, New York Times

Wall Street Journal and Washington Post

Our cities have none to comfort them

Except ourselves and Ha Maqom,

 Comforter of the mourners of Zion.

‘Turn us again,’ we say, ‘Renew our days,’

But all our days, even long ago

Were given up to mourning more than dancing

Still, turn us again and again.

I wake as late as possible

Bracing for the newest news

The bootless search for hostages

The cries of western outrage

Echoing the words from Gaza

The Health Authority, also Hamas,

Designated a terror organization

By some countries including the UK.

The death toll rises and the rage

Flows into my notifications

I, they say, am the killer

I do not take it personally

I see this is levelled at many Jews

On social media and on the streets.

Every day the same arguments:

That Zionism is not Jewish

Or that Jews are not Jewish

Or that we blew up the King David hotel

Or that we killed Christ.

Today I see Wes Streeting

Has turned against Israel’s war

It had to happen.

Losing is tolerable, winning  never.

We are all sorrowing

About the deaths in the rubble,

The lovely children, resembling

Our own children killed or kidnapped

By those who are designated

Terrorists in some countries

Including the UK.

Yeats dreamed of his final bed

Under bare Ben Bulben’s head

Viewing this life’s transience

Coldly, with insouciance.

Rupert Brooke was forced to yield,

Cornered in a foreign field,

And under heaven’s starry dome,

The hunter Stevenson is home.

Those who follow glory’s path

Or favour the domestic hearth

Are bound at last like Thomas Gray

To hear the knell at parting day.

Tennyson sailed out to sea,

Born forth to eternity,

Following the evening star

Noiselessly across the bar.

In Paris at Wilde’s sphinx-like tomb

The peace of death dispels life’s gloom

And still the visitors return

To weep into the broken urn.

When the stone is carved for me

Find some words of piety

Likely found within a psalm

Not of sorrow but of calm

And next to David I will lie

Just like in life, in time gone by.

The things I believe in:

reason and faith

love and pity

gratitude and generosity

truth and patience

The things I have:

family and love

words and pictures

food and wine

prayers and lights

The things I’ll miss:

family and light

sound and sight

meals and snacks

the sky and the sea

Things which will last:

the sun and the moon

art and science

boxes of photos

DNA and love.

For the sin we committed before you without knowing

For the pain we inflicted without looking back

For the offence we gave by inattention

For the offence we gave half-attentively

And for the sin we committed which we thought was a mitzvah

V’al kulam, Hashem selikhot, selakh lanu, makhal lanu, kapper lanu.

For the sin which we have forgotten

For being too absent and for being too present

For being too silent and for being too loud

For being insistent and for being inert

And for the sin of tweeting sarcastically

For all these sins, Hashem selikhot, forgive us, pardon us, grant us atonement.

A sharp word, offence taken

House red and galettes noirs

Another day, a branch snaps

Offence returns, the tide is in

Whipping the twilight sillons

A cold bed, hibernal dawn

Turns autumnal towards noon

A full carafe and gold Lambig

The frosted amity, the road, the sea

Dulce domum, the cold has reached

Ear, nose, throat, balsam tissues

In the Chinese restaurant

The phony peace, my throat

Constricted, resisting spring rolls

And Pinot too chilled to swallow

Our last supper a late lunch.

An email strikes, my faults named

Mea maxima, maxima culpa

Through a glass darkly but still

Puissant, force nine on Beaufort,

The continental drift is glacial

Ice sheets are cold as bed sheets

Thus a man and a woman

May cleave Europe in twain.

I was an infant, three months at the century’s half.

Never a time I didn’t know the word war,

The doll’s house wardrobe was my Dad’s ship

The doll’s house phone was Dad, in the ship,

He was a gunner. The phone was black

Like my Dad’s black hair.

My childhood was in the fifties. The books by Enid Blyton,

Malory Towers, St Clare’s, Famous Five, Secret Seven,

The Find-outers; also Frances Hodgson Burnett,

Louisa Alcott & Kenneth Grahame. I was Mole.

He was the most childlike, the least worldly,

Alone in the Wild Wood.

On the wireless they spoke of Suez and Anthony Eden

Dad got a car and a cine camera. We had a Highland holiday:

Lochs and pipers and my sister rode a horse

When we got back there was a new Prime Minister

And he had a Scottish name. Winds of change

Were sweeping here and there.

School was massive, Edwardian brick, and it took three years

For that fierce playground to be my safe domain;

I became an impresario and produced plays

Actors, songs, comedy in the classroom;

A bit of status before the sadness of puberty

In the new decade.

In the sixties, there was Coronation Street and the bomb,

Every day, I dreaded a nuclear war. My sister marched,

Aldermaston to London; then she was engaged,

Then away at college and I at my new school,

Twelve and overweight in a brown blazer,

Girls’ grammar, finicky rules.

At home I was like a lonely only child, Mum, Dad and me,

My grandmother and uncle died. Now there was death,

Besides the worry of the bomb and the new school

With homework to skimp, the inkwell and pen nibs;

I wanted to watch Dr Finlay’s Casebook

Across a hypotenuse.

Thirteen, fourteen, up to town with best friends

Followed by men old enough to know better

Wanting a boyfriend with intellectual heft

But at dances they were all hands and tongues.

The good news was a Labour government,

Wilson, the North, the Beatles.

Sixteen, seventeen, love, left wing activism,

Sex but not for enjoyment, more for politics,

Vietnam, Grosvenor Square, too much drink,

Antidepressants, psychiatrist, such nonsense,

Sergeant Pepper, No Satisfaction, Tambourine Man,

No place I’m going to.

I walked under the redbrick arch of the Arts Faculty,

1970, the fragrance of library books

Met my husband, conceived, graduated, married

Had a baby girl with a round little head and brown hair

Slowly she outgrew her delicate babygros, her cot,

Her Humperdinck musical bird.

Pregnant again, another baby, the girls play together

Toy koalas, Puffin married Gertrude the Hamster,

My own marriage hit the buffers and, apart,

We parented amicably to this very day;

Years and the Atlantic roll between us; the world shrinks,

The years fly fast as moths.

I had a lover who let his dog sleep on the bed;

In the wake of the Munich massacre and the Yom Kippur War

The Left parted company with Israel. Blasts of terror

Were heard in England and Northern Ireland;

On hearing a bat kol in Hampden Square

I forswore pig meat for ever.

David appeared in my life, carrying his little daughter,

His son close by; my girls eating heart shaped choc ices

The children played while we dated and loved

On New Year’s Eve his friends held a party

At the midnight hour, David said to me

‘The Eighties will be great.’

In 1980 we married, in a shul which is now a house,

I was pregnant and afraid of the bomb again;

In an Edmonton sports’ centre on Yom Kippur

An IRA bomb scare sent us all out of doors, swimmers in towels

Mingling where men held Sifrei Torah;

Fecund-nervous, I was first out.

Another baby girl, born that year and then,

In our third summer, a boy.  David worked and earned;

Beautiful and charismatic,

He sang like a chazan, mellifluous,

Insecure sometimes, later depressed,

Fearing middle age, a great irony.

On a weekday summer night, he got us all in the car,

Drove us to Waggon Road, a vantage point,

Spelled Wagon at the other end,

To view a stupendous sunset where he said

‘M’lo chol haaretz cavodo,’

‘The whole earth is full of His glory.’

1990 he had cancer, wore an implanted syringe,

Traveled with it on the plane to Tel Aviv,

Amused our children in Jerusalem

Skipping along with the night time shadows,

A man sang Birchat ha Mazon at a shabbat lunch,

David joined in, v’imru amen.

On a Galilee tourist boat, his pain returned;

Back to London and more chemo,

My parents’ golden wedding party,

Hospital, home, diamorphine, summer,

World Cup, hospital, morphine, saline drip

Doctor, nurses, the end.

The nineties were still ahead of me.

The older children were adults

The younger ones fatherless,

The house full of their friends every day

While the grown up girls had boyfriends

And, serially, I had partners too.

I worked with salt of the earth colleagues;

We had microfiche in those days,

Biography of Diana selling hand over fist

The People’s Princess all around us

The dawn of Tony Blair, a fast car in Paris

Tunnel, crash, death, aftermath.

Eve of the Millennium, at a sedate party,

The  guests played Who Wants to be a Millionaire

For chocolate prizes; the Eiffel Tower

Scintillated on TV,  our hostess who sparkled

With lively, benevolent charm

Is gone now, gone too soon.

Some friends made an introduction

And a tall, moustached lawyer appeared,

He knew the Köchel numbers for Mozart

The names of Beethoven sonatas

Played the children’s untuned piano

Could speak Russian and French.

Lived with him ten years, married for eight,

Loved him for seven years, then things happened,

The solicitor’s office, even the Christmas lights

Which lighten the mood in the darkest days

At Enfield’s Palace Gardens mall

Could not lighten my eyes.

In the first decade of the third millennium

My parents lost their health. They moved

Into a residential home, house and contents sold

Except for old school reports, exercise books,

Receipts from simchas of long ago

And paper headed LCC.

Nine eleven, in Seville far from the news

My firstborn in London pregnant

The girls dialing New York and dialing again

The phones down, the stupor, the rolling dust

Their father in lower Manhattan,

Deo gratias, he phones from a safe place.

2010, the decree absolute

The new flat, my son’s wedding

The Maghrebi ululation

As bride and groom were lifted on chairs

Caught in the photographer’s flash

Above the dancers’ crush.

Mum and Dad’s seventieth anniversary

The carers made dinner for two,

Rose petals on the table linen

An interviewer from Radio4 asked

‘What is the secret of your long marriage?’

‘Love,’ said Dad, ‘Love, love love.’

The next year he died, ninety-four,

Righteous to the end. Unexpectedly

Mum strengthened herself and carried on.

I dreamed of babies and babies came

Two more grandsons and a baby girl

Renewed my days as of old.

Next week would have been Mum’s century

But she made it to ninety-eight

And I turn threescore years and ten;

Already I have longevity.  Housman’s trees,

The sea, the sunset, the coloured lights,

I will miss them when I’m gone.

Populists and bigots now hold sway

But the divine sparks are all around

The sparks fly upward as seen by Job

‘Man is born unto trouble.’ Thus it was

From Patriarchal times until the present day

And still we reach toward the sparks.

Such golden days we had on all the Tashlichs

So rarely did the clouds cast a shadow

Over the autumnal East Walk with its sluggish brook

Where generations tossed bread, as if for ducks;

The young became adult and the adults old,

Different dogs over the years romped and sniffed

While we congregated on the bridge

And never thought to be afraid.

 

We had our honey cake and ate it

At the nearby house of Roz and Steve,

Where trays of tea never stopped coming

As wearing yontef clothes is thirsty work.

We could don kippot in the street,

We could display a Star of David

Small gold pendant, oblique modern silver.

Or a white and blue youth club T shirt.

 

Someone spat at Rose in Asda last week.

Her Star of David was visible, she said.

In 2018, you don’t wear a Magen David,

Not in Asda, by the Walkers multipacks.

There are online narratives full of old stories

Jewish usury, Rothschilds, Soros,

New World Order, David Icke,

They penetrate the mainstream

 

They reach unexpected places: Labour, the Trade Unions

The Uni,  Asda as we heard and West End pubs:

Dr D was set on in The Red Lion;

It was the t-shirt, but he got away.

Our postwar generation in fair Albion

Came in and went out in peace

Still do but many of us are nervous,

Jittery with a little inherited PTSD

 

For which they hate us, some of them.

Our elders went out weeping, not us;

We came back joyfully

Carrying our sheaves in Asda bags.

My uncle worked in remnants, textiles,

Selling rolls of cloth in the markets

It was the nineteen sixties.

I thought remnant was a funny word.

 

I did not know that we were the remnant.

‘Guardian of Israel guard the remnant of Israel

And suffer not Israel to perish

Who say Hear O Israel.’

Years later I went to Tashlich,

Still high after the uncanny tekiah

And the Avinu Malkenu.‘Save us,’ we said.

We say it still but with a different  cadence.

 

 

Gillian Lazarus  Elul 5778

 

 

 

 

 

 

The life of our love is drawing to a close

With the very slightest of death rattles,

Affection, desire, companionship,

Disappointment, resentment, a few battles,

They are sailing over the horizon,

They are wandering in no man’s land.

A quiet, exhausting sorrow attends me;

Five years we walked hand in hand,

Full of words, stories, jokes, meals,

Favourite films and special places,

Love dies but leaves an estate

Of associations and vegistial traces.

We avoided the L word; at least, you did,

I spoke it sometimes, fyi,

Having nothing to lose by it,

Love being a condition, not a battle cry.

I used a metaphor of glass baubles,

Intense, luminous colour, so brittle

They can shatter at a touch;

Wrap them now in a white kittel,

Handling with tensed, careful fingers.

Put them away out of sight.

They were lovely in their season,

Inappropriate beyond twelfth night.

A person can learn how to forget,

And only then, select something to remember,

But the big ship has sailed on the alley alley-O

In the last days of December.

 

21 December 2017