Valentine poems: an arrow through the heart

Valentine, O, Valentine / I'll be your love and you'll be mine,

We'll care for each other, rain or fine / and in 90 years we'll be 99.

-Ian Serraillier

If you won't be my Valentine / I'll scream, I'll yell, I'll bite.

I'll cry aloud, I'll start to whine / If you won't be my Valentine.

-Myra Cohn Livingston

Plenty of Love / Tons of kisses

Hope some day / To be your Mrs.

-Author Unknown

My love is like a cabbage / Divided into two

The leaves I give to others / The heart I give to you.

-Author Unknown

Valentines is near / Just wishing you were here

You will always be near / My heart will never be the same

-Jose Villalpando

Are we friends, Are we not / You told me once, but I forgot.

So tell me now and tell me true / So I can say I'm here with you.

-Author Unknown

Raindrops on our dresses / Sunshine on our face,

No matter what the weather / The look of love won't be replaced.

-Donna Wallace

I was lonely, sad, and blue / until the day that I meet you.

You came into my life and changed it around / turned my frown upside down.

-Author Unknown

To see my darling on his special day / Would put two Valentine wishes at bay.

Happy Birthday to him is the Valentine for me / Then two hearts once again get to share ecstasy.

-Lisa D. Myers

Someone asked me to name the time / Of when our love became sublime.

I searched high and low but could not find / It within the vast regions of my mind.

So now as I close it is time / Would please be my Valentine.

-Author Unknown

There's nothing in this world / That can express my love

You're as beautiful as an angel / And pure as a dove.

-Osman Espinoza

I searched high and low (as in one of the poems, above) to find Valentine poetry that is not terrifically bad (some of it is gross or obscene, which just does not do it for me), but truly mediocre. This is poetry with good intentions, poetry that doesn't KNOW it's bad. It's the Stairway to Stardom of Valentine verse, not quite rhyming, not quite NOT rhyming, with meter (if there is any) that is all over the place.

This collection appeared along with snippets by Shakespeare and Dorothy Parker ("one perfect rose"), which of course had to go. Some of these are by "known" writers, even known poets, which amazes me. The Florence Foster Jenkins of verse, perhaps?


I remember my crazy brother Arthur and I having a bad poetry contest which we called Peotry Korner. "Hey, that's spelled wrong!" one of our friends exclaimed. We were so dumb, and he needed to point that out! I think I may have won the contest with this:


"When skies R grey
and it precipitates
You remind me
of a load of wet hay.
Happy Doomsday!
Glad you're not here."

I was briefly part of a truly hair-raising "writer's group" called Women and Words, in which the main goal seemed to be not writing by a variety of means. We drank sangria, we talked about our kids and household products, and then someone came up with an idea for fundraising: not an anthology of our writing, but a COOKBOOK! I noticed the group had a "poetry expert", a little old lady with her hair in a bun and a print dress, as if someone had rocketed back in time to the 1950s to collect her. "Doris is our poetry expert," someone said, and Doris colored, saying, "Oh no no no no no."


Several times I heard statements from people like, "I just can't stand all that modern poetry. It doesn't even rhyme." Sooner or later someone had to get up to recite. The poems were not unlike the examples above (and I'm sorry I'm sounding so mean - I know I am - but this was just so frustrating for me, as I'd had high hopes for the group helping to dig me out of the landslide of loneliness I was trapped in).


"Oh mighty eagle who flies so high in the sky
Every time I see you I wonder why
Why you lift your wings and fly so high
Oh mighty eagle who flies so high in the sky"


The standard response to a poetry reading was, to a person, "Oh that's LOVE-ly!". I wondered if that really passed for a critique. By this time I was afraid to get up and read my own self-absorbed laments, most written in abstract form.  I just now realized that a version of this gathering found its way into my first novel, Better than Life, in which a Christlike, charismatic stranger named Bob attempts to initiate the good ladies of Harman into the mysteries of Yeats and Kahlil Gibran.

I went to two sessions of this group, and at the second one it looked as if we had attracted some actual writers (and one of the ladies outright admitted, "Oh, I don't really do any writing, I just come along for the social part"). One fiercely beautiful black woman got up and cast webs of fire over the room, after which there was dead silence.


"Well," said the old lady expert.


"Keep working on it," said Bev, the unofficial matriarch (unofficial, my ass - everything she said was law!). The writer looked distinctly uncomfortable. Another writer had built the substructure for a play, showing a definite talent for discernment - what doesn't need to be there, in other words - thus constructing the foundation for a major work.


Not much comment there, either.

At a certain point, when I made the embarrassing admission I'd written a novel (a truly bad novel, though at the time I thought it was pretty good), someone exclaimed, "Oh, are you Margaret Gunn?" I wanted to say "ING". I had a weekly column in the local paper then, but it seemed she had only managed to read half of it. Another woman asked me, "What's the conflict?", something straight out of Writers Group 101. Obviously, it was the thing to say, the question to ask to show that you understood, that you Knew. I still don't know what it meant.

Oh, but I do remember one actual exercise - we were supposed to take a pen and paper and write down the name of our character, then write down EVERYTHING we could think of about them. There was even a questionnaire. Where they were born, when they were born, who their parents were, what they looked like, their shoe size, and blah blah blah blah blah. It was only later that I realized that trudging through writing a novel would be intolerable if you already knew everything. It's the finding out that is the thing. And if it doesn't interest you - fascinate you, in fact - then it sure as hell will not interest the reader.


Where is all this coming from? There's nothing wrong with drinking sangria and exclaiming "oh, that's lovely!" after every poem. But in a way, "writer's group" is a contradiction in terms. In my experience, giving yourself to the process is often horrendously lonely, to the point that I understand why so many poets commit suicide.

I don't know why I've done this for so many years, except that I'm not good at anything else. No, I mean it, or at least not anything I can do professionally. I haven't had anyone refer to my work as a "nice hobby" for a while now, maybe because they've given up talking to me altogether.


People fall away. They lose interest, or find they can't do it, bury their ambition where it festers and ruins their lives. I become sick of halting myself, to keep pace with their faux interest/dedication. They just stop, or they make themselves stop. I had a friend exclaim, when I made a friendly suggestion that she try keeping a blog, "What would I write about?" But it was her facial expression that cut me: baffled, as if I'd said "why don't you start a worm farm"; offended, as if I'd said "why don't you have an affair with your neighbor"; disgusted, as if I'd said "why don't you shovel shit for a living." And even at that, there was an aspect to her reaction that I can't describe, a mouthful of vinegar or something else awful, with her tone of voice full of "whaaaaat?" Not just incredulous, but ferociously judgemental. It was casting her own insecurity and frustrated ambition back in my face, not unlike the cobra-strike ploys used by my sister for years and years.

I had obviously said the wrong thing. But she had no idea why her reaction bothered me, which was even worse. That friendship died in a torrent of bile which made me realize her ambition had long ago been interred and was sending up noxious fumes of decay.


OK, I never expected to go on and on like this. Are there "real" writers" then, to be divided from the dabblers like the sheep from the goats? YES. Does this have anything to do with money or prestige or even getting widely published and becoming some sort of quasi-celebrity like that bitch who wrote Fifty Shades? Of course not.


It has to do with dedication, but it's something else. Painful as all this is, you can't live without it. I find I replicate my initial experiences of utter obscurity again and again, and the chances of this changing at my age are extremely slim. But I've come to realize that if I needed recognition, I would have quit long ago. Keeping on with it at this level of intensity would have been impossible. So it's something else that drives me, and, I suspect, almost every other writer.

I don't always like what I do. It's kind of like being married. Habit? Not quite. Just a need, something I can't describe or even get away from. It galloped away with me a very long time ago.


A long long long time ago when I was seeing a therapist, I was also listening (incessantly) to k. d. lang's brilliant Ingenue album (which I have started listening to again). I was talking to her about a certain song, how I felt it was much more than a love song.


"Why do you say that?"


I wasn't sure what I was saying.


"I think it's about her work. You know. . . not so much the singing as the writing."

I often wonder

is it so

All I am holding

wants let go

How could I manage

I don't know

I often question

Is it so

Life's contradictions

tend to grow

Spawning the choices

and the woe

But still somehow thrives this love

Which I pray I'm worthy of

Still somehow thrives this love

I often wonder

Is it so

Lessons of patience

are learned slow

Earnings of labour

may never show

But still somehow thrives this love

Which I pray I'm worthy of

Still somehow thrives this love

k. d. lang

Visit Margaret's Amazon Author Page!

http://www.amazon.com/-/e/B001K7NGDA

Fifty Shades: let's bring back perversion!

  

Most of what happened to me in my childhood happened in the den.

We called it the “den”, not the “TV room” or “family room” (the inference being it can't be a family room without at least one TV), for reasons unknown, except that maybe in the ‘60s, that was what you called it.

It had a pullout sofa-bed, a black-and-white TV, an ancient ironwork-sided sewing machine, and an “imprinting machine” (my Mum did imprinting, personalizing leather goods and even pencils for my Dad’s stationery store) with drawers full of magical gold foil that I was forever tampering with.

But most of all, it had books. Seemingly thousands of them, I always thought, though I now remember just one solid wall, and another with (? Did I transpose this from my older siblings’ ever-changing university digs?) brick-and-board bookcases.

Lots of these were in German. My sister studied German in university for reasons that are now a complete mystery to me. Why? There was not even the remotest connection in any part of our family to Germany, and yet she wrote her Master’s thesis, in German, on The Rise and Fall of the City of Mahagonny by Bertolt Brecht and Kurt Weill.

I would often hear the wailings of Lotte Lenya on the stereo when I came home from school, which was very embarrassing when I brought a friend home. But I digress. In those brick-and-board bookcases, there was Goethe, there was Schiller, and there was a feeling I was just supposed to accept this as “normal”, because my sister (13 years older than me) said it was.

To my 10-year-old delight, there were a few dirty books (hers, I assume) strewn amongst the dull novels in the den:  A Rage to Live by John O’Hara (“oh, darling, you’re in me and I’m all around you, just in time, time, tme”), Sons and Lovers (“I will always remember that evening when the peewits called”), and even Cocksure, a mildly gamey book by Mordecai Richler, which thrilled me because it had the word “bastard” in it.  All this mulled around and around in my mind. I was beginning to formulate, or even come up with a formula, for what sex meant.

It surely meant simultaneous orgasm. If you had anything else, it was dirty and even frightening, and definitely “wrong”. You were not normal. This was especially true if you were married.

It meant forbiddenness. It meant crossing barriers of class, power and station (Lady Chatterley’s Lover). This was definitely stuff I wasn’t supposed to be seeing.

Then I discovered it, nestled dustily right against the volumes and volumes of Goethe and Schiller: THE COMPLETE WORKS OF SIGMUND FREUD!

Now I was off to the races.

Now I learned. I learned about penis envy. I learned about polymorphous perversity. I learned that women were inferior beings. I learned about latent homosexuality. I learned about vaginal orgasm. I learned.

I learned about stuff, then believed to be crucial to understanding human nature, that is now so dusty and obsolete that nobody even thinks about it any more, let alone talks about it. When you think about it, it is remarkable that so many people accepted without question theories that had never been proven clinically, or any other way. It was simply the truth.

The one hangover now is “anal”, which means, I don’t know, uptight or something. It did to Freud, too. An anal personality, anal retentive. Holding in your poo for some reason, though I couldn’t tell why, maybe because you were constipated or couldn’t get to the bathroom.

These were the golden days. These were the days of “perversion”. Do you remember perversion? Back then, anything that wasn’t simultaneous orgasm in the marriage bed was perversion.

Homosexuality was the result of a domineering mother and a weak father. Nobody questioned this. It was the only thing I ever heard about the matter, except for the expressions “limp-wristed” and “pansy”.

There was still a moral taint on it, the shadow of illegality that broke the spirit of Oscar Wilde. There was a sense that it was a sort of blight, that it was impossible to “correct”, and that the sufferer just had to abstain (I mean, forever) and conceal it completely to be socially acceptable.

So. Homosexuality was a mental illness or even a “perversion”. These attitudes, we now see, were groaningly wrong and must have caused immeasurable grief to thousands of people.

I didn’t know about a lot of other things, extreme things such as whips and chains.  I didn’t really know until tomorrow (oops, that’s the future, so I’d have to know in advance) when this Fifty Shades of Grey movie comes out. (Note: this was written on February 12. Confusing.)

ANY kind of inflicting of pain or punishment on another person was, in my backward day and with my den mentality, seen as sadism, and therefore “perversion”. It stood to reason, in my mind. Being turned on by experiencing pain, or (worse) inflicting pain was so twisted that I could not understand it at all. But it has changed, and drastically, in a fairly short period of time. At this point in our social evolution, it’s quite OK so long as the other person, the masochist, “gives consent”.

This happened with Jian Ghomeshi, remember? All his girl friends “gave consent”, so in an official sense, it was all OK.

Except that they didn’t. And it wasn’t.

“You can’t give consent if you are abused,” a very smart person I know (an award-winning news reporter) told me. Therefore, the woman who had been pounded to a bruised pulp and had her ribs broken by Ghomeshi hadn’t “consented”, because if someone beats the living shit out of you and breaks your bones, your abuser cannot use the legal excuse that you “gave consent”. Even if you did, it's null and void, because presumably you didn't know in advance that you would be brutally crushed.

Or maybe it's not. We’ll find out, won’t we?

The BDSM “community” insists that the receiver knows exactly what he or she is in for, wants it, and can get out of it any time, with a signal of some kind. But it seems to me that sadism is something that can be awfully hard to manage. Doesn’t it sometimes, just sometimes, go over the edge? By its very nature, I think that the possibility of loss of control might be part of the thrill.

And what of a person who “consents” but is deeply masochistic and profoundly self-hating? I’ve heard of “rough trade”, though I don’t know much about it, and I will confess that I don’t want to. Brian Epstein used to be found beaten, bloody and unconscious after such encounters. Was this  “OK” because he had given consent? Or did he, in the first place? 

(And if everybody's drunk or stoned and out of control, what does THAT add to the mix? It isn't fashionable to ask these things, but I ask them now.)

Such a person (a victim in my view), and I am only putting this out as a possibility, might WANT to be very badly hurt, even killed. Moreover, it might not be good for them to get what they want, because it’s too dangerous and they are too psychologically sick. I can hear the screams of protest right now: wait a minute, that’s impossible! It can't go too far as long as everyone's cool about the "rules". But in the wild and woolly world of human sexuality, is anything truly impossible?

Ghomeshi could argue that she wanted it, even told him it was OK. I don’t know what was going on there. If his unknown victim (the one with the bruises and broken ribs) claims it WAS consensual, then we’re really in a mess, aren’t we? Caught in a legal and sexual murkiness that we may never straighten out.

I have hardly touched on this Fifty Shades phenomenon, but I see that some women’s groups are protesting that it glorifies domestic violence. But hey! Violence is OK (or, at least, playing at violence is OK), even exciting, if you give your consent. Isn't it?  How about if you have a domineering husband who keeps threatening to leave and pull his financial support out from under you and your children? Might you be more likely to “consent” in this situation? You’d probably do anything to save your children, not to mention your life.

“It was just a sex game gone wrong.” Yes. I know this has been used before. “She wanted it, she asked for it.” What does that mean? How often do sexual and gender boundaries get blurred and confused? How about financial/power boundaries? (Christian in Fifty Shades certainly fits the rich and powerful profile.) How many ways can one human being make another human being submit, and how is this so different from slavery? (Master-slave language is very much a part of the “lifestyle”, making me wonder what black people think of it.)

I have not heard the word “perversion” in so long, I don’t know where it went. Does it even exist now, does the concept exist? I know that certain Christian fundamentalists seem to think that if people are “allowed” to be gay, it will open the floodgates to having sex with horses: an “anything goes” philosophy.

That’s horse’s-ass stuff, but I will say, I wonder where all this is taking us. Even playing at inflicting pain alarms me: why would anyone need to do it, unless they were, in some way, sexually perverted? Hurting someone is wrong. Wrong. Isn't it?

But no, now it’s stylish, and it’s certainly popular. I just found out that the original Fifty Shades trilogy started out as Twilight  “fan fiction’. With all its supposed restrictions on content, if fan fiction has become this sexually extreme, I honestly have to wonder what will come next. I wonder what will become of human boundaries, if there are any, and what will happen to the nature of something we still insist on calling “making love”.

  Visit Margaret's Amazon Author Page!

http://www.amazon.com/-/e/B001K7NGDA

Seeing is believing: 20 Victoria Avenue

Date Listed 10-Feb-15
Price
$169,900.00
Address 20 VICTORIA AVE, CHATHAM, Ontario, N7L 2Z6
View map

Bedrooms (#) 4 bedrooms
Bathrooms (#) 2 bathrooms
For Sale By Professional


SEEING IS BELIEVING, LOVELY 1.5 STOREY SIDED HOME ON THE AVENUE, WALKING DISTANCE TO DOWNTOWN, REMODELLED WITH GORGEOUS KITCHEN W/CENTRE ISLAND, FORMAL DININGROOM, LARGE LIVINGROOM , 2 UPDATED BATHS, FULL BASEMENT, LAUNDRY HOOK-UPS ON MAIN FLOOR & LOWER LEVEL, 2 CAR DETACHED GARAGE, MOVE-IN READY, A PLEASURE TO SHOW.... ECO INSULATION IN 2012 UPDATED WINDOWS+++ SELLERS RELOCATING

Brokered And Advertised By: BARBARA PHILLIPS REAL ESTATE BROKER Brokerage
Listing Agent: BARBARA PHILLIPS


More Details MLS ® : 365042004711300

By the holy, here it is, after a long, long wait. The house I grew up in, 20 Victoria Avenue in Chatham, Ontario, is a home once more, and up for sale.

In fact, I don't know  how long it has been a home. The last information I got was that it had been converted into a doctor's office, a fact that made me sad. There are only details here and there to anchor it, it has changed so much. The outside, now white instead of yellow, is almost identical, except that (like everything from childhood, for some reason) it looks much smaller. That fireplace, sadly boarded up, was fully functional, though we didn't start using it until sometime in the mid-60s. There was a red-brown terrazzo floor just in front of it that is still there (along with a beautifully-tiled vestibule, a little room that led from the front door to the front room). They don't make houses like this any more.

Oh, and - someone finally ripped up that "luxurious wall-to-wall carpeting" to reveal the gorgeous hardwood beneath. Back then, only poor people had hardwood.

. 

Is this the dining room? The table seems enormous.  I can see a chandelier here - is it the same one? It had plaster fruit on the ceiling, which had been painted over but which (I was told) used to be in natural colours. Is that moose horns on the wall? Ye gods, we were NOT a moose-horn family, not by a long shot. The angle of this photo is so weird that I can't tell what part of the house it is. Oh, wait - now I see, it has been taken FROM the dining room, pointing out toward the front windows in the living room. Where my mother put those electric candles out at Christmas. The Christmas tree resided on the left-hand side where the leather sofa is.

The kitchen now has an island. Granite, by the looks of it. It has been vastly remodelled. The original was very old-fashioned. I see some sort of room beyond the door - what is that, where? I don't know my way around my own house. But I do sort of remember those cabinets.

The nice thing about it being a doctor's office for so long is that parts of it probably weren't ripped out or used, so original cabinets, cupboards, etc. would be preserved. If they were out of date for decades, now they're fashionably retro.

Now I see where we are - the downstairs bathroom, with the tub on the right. It's funny how they converted the old fixtures to "modern" ones, then back to old-fashioned ones. I remember one day that the huge rectangular mirror over the sink fell on my head. I wonder if the big medicine cabinet is still there. It was so high-up I had to stand on the edge of the tub to reach it (before the tub had a wall). I would steal Benylin cough syrup and drink it out of the bottle until my ears buzzed.

The upstairs bathroom - and yes, even back then we had two bathrooms, an impossible luxury. I remember this because I see the relationship between the tub (now a hot tub) and the toilet. My brother and I used this one, and later, when everyone else had left,  just me.

Compare and contrast.

I think my photo from the early '60s looks much, much better. It shows off the actual size of the place, rather than making it into a dinky cottage. I am not sure about square footage, but four bedrooms, a den, and a large living and dining room don't make for a dinky house. The basement was huge, and though it was unfinished, we had a pool table down there and used it all the time as a rec room.

The house next door looks different now. It used to be old brick, but was likely torn down. I look at the fairly empty space to the right and wonder if the other house was torn down too, where the Peet kids lived. They had a pigeon coop that I absolutely adored, and I could get to it by climbing the gnarled cherry tree that sprawled across the white picket fence. And yes, my Mum made pies out of those cherries, sour cherries, pitting them laboriously. I taste them now, stringent and sweet, like Proust's madeleines.

But 20 Victoria Avenue, Chatham, Ontario, Canada, still exists, still stands, and I hope will house a family. Such a house would be upwars of a million dollars here, perhaps more in places like North Van.

20 Victoria in colour, a nice shot that has not faded with  time. This must have been a good camera. You can see the yellow, fairly intense. Here I'm walking my dachschund Willie, after school, or I never would have been in a dress.

I guess I was seven years old. I never could keep my legs together. My goofy expression ruined this shot. My mother looks characteristically severe.

This is one of my very first attempts at Photoshop, and it's nice, I think. You have the indigo moon and cloud, and the purplish house.

Anyway, I hope it sells, so it won't be turned back into a doctor's office.

http://www.kijiji.ca/v-house-for-sale/chatham-kent/20-victoria-ave/1050535773

POSTSCRIPT: I've found a few more photos, and one of them just jumped off the screen at me! I have a little setting on my Adobe photoshop program that restores original colour. I clicked it, and a yellowed old shot suddenly burst into vibrant colour.

This is a wacky shot, purposely I guess, and I'm the one sitting on the back of the sofa. I remember that blouse, it was a sort of gauzy material. My brother Arthur, long since departed, sits in the Thinker pose.  I happen to know that all of us are drunk.

This is, however, a nice interior shot, showcasing the old-fashioned front windows (the "storm windows" that had to be put up in the fall) and the awful wall-to-wall travesty that covered gorgeous hardwood. Somehow hardwood stigmatized a house and a family, like a dirt floor.

And there WAS a dirt floor, a little root cellar in the basement that I used to wonder about, plus a dumbwaiter that my mother used as a laundry chute.  That means that at one time or another, there were servants.

And, yes, the sun porch. I struggle to remember it, but there were lovely big screened windows in it in the summer, relieving the wretched melted-rubber heat, and I'd sleep out there on a fold-out bed and listen to the crickets. Bliss.

At the back of my bedroom closet was a door, and the door led to another closet. I have never seen anything like it. Did they hide refugees in there, I wonder? Chatham was one of the termination points of the Underground Railroad, a fact I never learned in school. So one never knows. Who would think to look for a closet inside a closet? The historical dates may be wrong. So I wonder how such an Alice-in-Wonderland feature came to be. And I wonder if it's still there.

Post-post.  Here is an attempt to clean up, enlarge and crop the realtor's crappy photo. I don't know why they used that one - half of it the house next door. The house is barely in the frame, and looks like a tiny cottage. It isn't. I lived there. I know.

  Visit Margaret's Amazon Author Page!

http://www.amazon.com/-/e/B001K7NGDA

The Diary of Anne Frank: a cycle of narrative poems (part four of four)

The Red Diary

A cycle of narrative poems inspired by the diary of Anne Frank 

by Margaret Gunning

Part four of four

To the memory of Anne Frank

Happy

Tears:  sometimes

it is too much for you,

you fold up and sob,

trying to keep it quiet,

contained:  but your grief will split you

if you don’t give it room,

so you draw up your knees

and convulse silently

in the stale attic room

in the dark.

Yet, you write of being happy;

I believe it.

In the midst of all,

in raw raging hell,

in boredom, in despair, in fury with the adults,

in all this, a shy happiness blooms inside,

delicate as white petals,

protected,

held inside your heart

like a sweet secret:

you are happy as only the doomed can be happy,

this day sufficient,

this moment of precious silence,

this sense of God stealing near. . .

warm against your skin,

tender presence, stirring,

life itself,

insistent,

miraculous,

conquering all

by a single intake of breath:

the act of breathing,

beating,

being.

 Not my diary

Then:  a break-in, burglars rattling

suspiciously downstairs, police on the trail,

and a frozen night of terror,

eight hearts pounding. . . all of you

lying on the floor, afraid to move,

a wastepaper basket for a toilet,

and whispers:  hide the radio!

What’s the use?  If they find us,

we’ll have no need for it.

Hide the diary.

No!  burn it –

not my diary!

(“If my diary goes,

I go too!”)

What shall we say to the Gestapo?

Impossible conversations.

Rehearsing for doom.

A raw smell of sweat, of feces.

One night spent crammed together

in a stinking airless room,

bodies churning with fright.

When the threat passes,

suddenly you’re older, years older,

forced through another grinder,

and you write, like one who has lived through

a thousand years of torment,

“We’re Jews in chains,

chained to one spot,

without any rights,

but with a thousand obligations.”

But like the psalmist

who howls in loneliness and anguish,

you still say, “God has never

deserted our people.”

In the midst of all,

you stand; you stand.

“If God lets me live,” you declare

with the faith of a thousand generations,

“I’ll make my voice heard.”

 Doubt

And yet.

In the next breath, the doubt:

you wonder if anyone will ever want

to look at “this drivel”:  your rapt, fascinating

account

turns to dust before your eyes.

Now I know you are a writer,

twisting, impaled on doubt

that never ends,

pressing on in the face of it,

surely the ultimate task.

 Peter

They call it knutscherei:

stolen kisses, closeness, body heat

your heart swaying,

Father worrying, yes, worrying

that you could get pregnant,

all that time spent there in the attic, alone together –

and then what would you do;

but fear and shyness

keep you from venturing further

than a chaste kiss, a caress,

yet this glancing touch

makes your legs turn to water,

you want to surrender,

to press for more,

but jump back from the might of it:

forces unknown,

hungers

stirred, but never satisfied,

wild forces

repressed,

mysteries never probed –

Peter, whom you never would have

given the time of day

if your world had been normal,

now becomes your prince,

your heart’s companion,

your only.

Each day (an interlude)

We are given, each day

only enough to get through;

never more.

We may call this

manna

in the wilderness of our own lives,

with nothing left to gather

at the end of the day,

and only trust

to help us open our eyes again,

face the howling uncertainty

once more.

If the world should end today,

if this should be our last, our final day,

we would not know it;

the unknowing

is a blessing of sorts,

the thing that helped me go to school each day,

keep the secret confined

within my small body,

only revealed after decades

of numbness

and oblivion,

a strange, raw flower

blooming like the spread of blood

in water,

a blossom of despair, of damage

swelling purple like a contusion,

a truth,

surging upward like a germinating seed,

mysterious,

inexorable –

but because true, then unstoppable,

even a gift of sorts,

a reanimating of that which had died,

a return to a wholeness I had never known,

a birth into completeness.

I was given back my life;

yours was taken.

The loss is a slap,

or worse, an amputation –

I want you back,

these words are not enough,

this account is not enough,

we need you here –

I know how the story ends

and hate the ending,

hate this waste, this waste

magnified six million times

until it is beyond

what I can even imagine.

 Afraid

“I’m afraid of myself,” you write,

afraid of what wells up inside you:

you speak of your period,

red hope spreading

from your place of secrets;

you know there is a connection

between this bright bloom

and your passion in the attic:

Father looks concerned, he wants to protect you,

knowing your loneliness,

your fear:  you write,

always in hope,

“I feel liberation drawing near.”

You write:  “Why should I despair?”
There are only three months left

until they take you:  but you do not know that,

or you could not live.

 Stop

Stop the train:  the end of this

I cannot bear;

stop –

 The Annex

Twenty-five months;

a protected time,

suffocating,

hard:  but nothing to what will come;

the cattle car, the uniform

the shouted orders,

Auschwitz:  but never tell me,

for I cannot bear it –

not my Anne,

not this one, but: yes, they all, all –

 Final passage

Sixty years ago, this week. . .

a weariness,

a sense of being overwhelmed,

yet I must read on,

finish it, my heart split

with the effort,

yet how dare I grieve,

how dare I – so far from this,

so safe –

In the midst of all,

not knowing how close you are

to the end of the story,

you study the classics:  “Orpheus, Jason

and Hercules

all waiting to be untangled,

since their various deeds are running

crisscross through my mind

like multicoloured threads in a dress.”

You clothe yourself with knowledge,

still and focused

in your attic room,

deadly calm,

your studies a form of sanity,

of steering –

You dream of a book of your own,

The Secret Annex,

perhaps a novel

based on your time of hiding.

The chestnut tree

outside your window

bursts into bloom, it is May,

the world insists on continuing,

your father receives

three eggs for his birthday,

and you write,

“unless you’re a Nazi,

you don’t know what’s going to happen to you

from one day to the next.”

You see the abyss between

daily pleasure

and perpetual terror:  “that gap,

that enormous gap,

is always there.”

Sometimes you hope for the end,

no matter how terrible,

just to resolve the grinding anxiety;

you wait,

you wait,

the radio your hope,

D-Day, the invasion,

Churchill’s voice,

and everyone glancing at each other,

wondering how to feel,

what to allow,

heads bent, intent,

everyone sweating

in the airless room:  when, when –

and somewhere, in all this

your girlhood has been lost,

stolen by fear

and crowding,

stolen forever:  my heart pounds,

I feel sick,

I want to run,

I want to put the book away,

but it insists, it insists,

listen to me, it says across the gap

of sixty years,

listen to how it was with us,

to how it was –

 Good at heart

Then comes the statement the world remembers,

“I still believe,

in spite of everything,

that people are truly good at heart.”

And a full stop:

ANNE’S DIARY ENDS HERE.

But not the story; not the story.

One day in August, the door bursts open,

and it is over.

Requiem

Mr. Van Daan:  gassed to death in Auschwitz.

Mrs. Van Daan:  dead; date and place, unknown.

Peter:  died in Mauthausen (Austria), three days before liberation.

Dussel:  died in Neuengamme.

Mother:  died from starvation in Auschwitz-Birkenau,

all her bread hoarded for her girls.

The sisters:  taken to Bergen-Belsen

where they sickened and died,

their young bodies

dumped in a mass grave.

A few weeks later the troops arrived.

 The survivor

Pim lived on,

lived to be immensely old,

lived with his memories,

the diary his legacy, his hope;

he married a woman

who came through Auschwitz,

and perhaps

they did not need to talk,

perhaps

the number on the forearm

was enough.

 Miep

An old, old woman is left,

the keeper of the diary,

the one who snatched it from oblivion

in a moment of prescience.

I realize, with shock

that she is still alive,

though nearing a hundred.

Is it difficult to die

when you hold so many secrets?

When Miep speaks,

the world listens.

What she has waited to say

is just as true,

sixty years on.

“Most of humanity

did not even want to know what was happening.”

She speaks simply.

Slowly.

Choosing her words.

No wasting.

An ordinary woman

in an impossible time,

she did what was necessary,

daily,

daily,

for more than two years.

When she speaks, the connection is completed,

the little girl in the closet,

cowering,

the woman afraid to admit

she has suffered

because so many millions suffered more;

it all comes clear in a single, simple statement:

“Anne stands for the absolute innocence

of all victims.”

 To come through

Absolute innocence:

my eyes are opened.

Take away the differences; there are none.

This is what it is to be human:  to be held captive

against your will,

to be persecuted,

hunted down,

violated,

vulnerable; this is what it is

to endure,

to hold on

to integrity,

to hope,

to stay human

through atrocity,

to remain merciful when punished without mercy,

to “be”, to carry on,

to remarry,

to have another child,

to tell the story

over and over

in simple words, direct and compelling,

leaving out no detail

for it all counts toward glory,

to open our eyes

each day

in an ultimate act of courage

to the same light,

yes, the same light she knew

through the merest crack

in the blackout curtain,

hope spearing through the shade,

illuminating:

and this is the lesson,

daily,

daily,

pledged beyond reason

to a future that may never be,

for this is all we have,

and all we require:

the need to breathe

in an airless room,

the need to imagine and plan

beyond a suffocating confinement,

the need to see past the day of despair,

to live beyond,

to pick up the bleeding threads

and make a life,

to lift up our hands

in supplication

and praise

and gratitude

for what is left,

for the valour

and the honour

and the stubbornness

and the grace

to come through.