I Went Back To My Parents' Home Poem by gershon hepner

I WENT BACK TO MY PARENTS' HOME


I went back to my parents' home,
but I could not see any sign
of them. All paths don't lead to Rome,
but to one's parents. It seemed mine
had left no traces there, no forum,
no Coliseum, no St. Peter's.
Nor did I see a manly quorum
of hatted men, all kosher eaters,
frum Jews who gathered there to pray,
as both my mum and dad would do
each morning, evening, every day,
or any strangers at the doors doors.
"Schnorrers! " they'd explain, but try
to help them, asking not the cause
for which they begged, in case they'd lie.

Family would sometimes visit,
Onkel Bernhard, Tante Fanny;
mezuzah they would see, and kiss it,
and enter saying something funny.
When I lived there both Mum and Dad
worked hard to help the Jewish State,
as they did when the times were bad,
and saving lives from Hitler hate
kept them so busy. How their life
was complicated when the Brits
were fighting Jews! Both husband, wife,
and their four kids survived the Blitz,
together with their Oma who
would die of natural causes though
a V2 rocket's blast once blew
a hole in her bedroom's window,
but they remembered millions who
did not survive. I looked for traces
of them, but could find no clue,
and left the house with pensive paces,
realizing that like them
my wife and I would also dis-
appear, becoming a mere mem-
ory whom nobody would miss,
and felt I had to write down some
few lines recalling them to me,
before death caused them to be dumb,
a vicarious dernier cri.

It's now Yom Kippur eve, and I
recall before the fast this line-
anonymous the phone call-"Why
don't you go back to Palestine? "
As I recall them, I can see
my parents' philosophic faces.
The world's not changed, I'm glad to be
myself reliving parent traces,
not back in Palestine, now Is-
rael, many now demand
that Zionists should leave, which is
an irony I understand
as paralleling that of God,
whose choice of Jews like Mum and Dad
came with a guarantee that's odd
since it's ironically clad.

My poem was inspired by a lovely nostalgic poem that Linda had sent me, "Back Home, " whose opening line was "I went back to my house."

The opening lines of this poem recall a poem I wrote on 9/5/10, "Felix Nussbaum Recalls His Parents." He informed the German-Jewish painter Ludwig-Meidner in a 1925 letter: "I am much to uneducated to deny God…I cannot search for God. I ca only believe in my parents, and for sake (perhaps because I am a stupid person) keep the festivals-out of love. Is this not then love? Whether the closeness between me and my parents is God-I don't know."

9/17/10,3/25/12 #9682