Two Jewish Boys Poem by Frank Bana

We may have lost the Torah, but we had The Favourite Game
My voice and your guitar on the Charing Cross Road
Simple chords in Hampstead at Cyranos, sweetcorn-drenched burgers
Up at Maxwell’s, playing ping pong till you won
Playing golf till you won, playing girls just the same
You married one of them
Your captive bride
I guess you won again

However long it took, you aimed to be a writer
You wanted to save Israel
From your command post on a hill
I wanted to save the poor
We both still do

Neither you nor I succeeded (yet)
You published your first book at 58
And threatened the online world
With 30 more, your basement literature
Which I have no time or will to read
For I have some recruiter to impress
Lest my latest trip to Africa
(Sweet-scented beauty that she is)
Turn out to be my last

No-one now needs skills like these
The calls are silent for my pieties
How goes it with your histories?
I have to ask you for
We don’t call each other anymore.
I got my pension, you your Website and manuscripts
Now digitized, we both wear glasses to disguise our eyes
In case they might reveal the naked souls
Of two little Jewish boys

John and George, Gunner and Spur
Bob and Lenny, Jonathan and David
The Psalm king and the singing follower

Naughty boys the ghetto never whipped
Saved from oblivion by real estate
And by the schmatter trade, lost boys
Whose fathers died in the same small frame
That separates us at our birth, our mothers live alone
And we over the ocean, why, why, why
Do the women that we thought to love
Sheba’s girls with hidden knives
Hate us like the poison and detest
The you in me, I can tell you now

No matter the stern distance, the unmentionable pain
I feel your breath, your arms, our single kiss
Two artists in one mirror, refugees from history, free
To drive the sodium-bright evening streets
In the wrong direction once again

And though I hate the thing you are
And some memories have a reflex gag
I’m glad for what I’ve heard, about you doing well
With your calculations, books and friends
Somewhere in the not-so-distant world.