Russian Family History Poem by Frank Bana

I was born in a peaceful time and place
My father just out of uniform
The draft and ration books thrown away
Abundance grew in our English garden

The empire was dissolving but its ties
For worse or better would long endure
As a future traveller to many lands
I would discover and learn to explore.

From the port of Odessa they had come
Leaving Smorgon village, carrying its name
Settling down to toil, in London's East End
Never to talk of Russia again

Jenny, Louis, Violet, Peg,
The children of the ships of 1904
Building a platform of support
For the generations to follow them

Trotsky left town, Mosely came by
To beat on their doors and smash their store
They had out-run the Cossacks, how could they yield
To bully-boys imitating Nazi hordes

And sixty years on, summer of '91
A great-grandchild of those who sailed
Sat with his parents at the TV set
Transfixed by a ballet in mid-pirouette

Gorbachev confronted, then overthrown
The Empire and its collectives torn down
While Nizhni-Novgorod, from where forefathers fled
Lay poverty-soaked, children dying and dead

Now the earth has opened its secrets so far
The danger is that it will all split apart
Its passengers spilled from the side of the Ark
Butterflies, mammals and cities alike

It's a pity we remember less than we forget
For as a child, learning from the Rabbi's tongue
I had a small sense of our history's ballet,
More agile than empires in the long run.