Love As A Light… Poem by Louise Tredoux

Rudi understands these bouts of crying when
I’m listening to Beethoven’s Moonlight Sonate,
Appassionate, when I cry for all things and
events that we dread in our hearts

My mother dying at childbirth so I never knew
her, never felt her loving touch - Romania’s
orphans dying without care of staff, my gran’
forced to wed an older man

Made to serve him and his children like a domestic
drudge, never broke free from the yoke, even went
to prison for theft on behalf of her precious son -
Anne Frank in a concentration camp

After two year’s confinement in a secret apartment,
crying “There is no-one left” - her shaved head,
human dignity bereft, only in our remembrance
is she esteemed and redeemed

By her brave attempt to survive the horrors of World
War Two; crying again, Rudi understanding I need to
cry to lighten the burden of feeling the grief in
reliving the pain of the world

Though I believe all pain self-inflicted to serve a specific
purpose – maybe to make us cry, It cleanses the soul,
makes my heart whole, shining love as a light
on Rudi himself…