Connection Poem by Lionel Abrahams

for Lorenzo van Breda (b. 1999)

Child - you who have arrived in time and just in time
to knock for us at the tremendous door
of a new thousand years - you of yourself will take along
no memory of our exhausted century,
our troubled, much-transforming
yet still strangely trusting ‘nineteen-hundreds'.

When that door swings wide a hurricane of sheer futurity
will rush upon you and us all
to change us, world and race, and more,
change change itself, language and history.
So I must wonder what small part of cherished heritage
(the art and stories, science and aspirations
that have defined through age on age
the waiting outline of our more-than-nature)
can survive the storms of alteration.
And this aching doubt leads me to greet with gratitude
your given name - Lorenzo.

This famous name you carry carries poetry in its syllables
and carries into time a treasure-store of memory:
history's magnificence, Shakespeare's art, and more -
thus helps us old inheritors to hold this hope:
the unformed new millennium may not blot out its past
but relate a further chapter of the human tale.