For a dancer

Posted on by celfypridd

Loss and friendship

 

I sat with some people I wouldn’t call friends

We’re about the same age and share certain things

Like being born after the second world war.

They used that odd phrase “back in the day”

And talked of losses like Hendricks, Morrison

And Janis Joplin with a degree of familiarity

That doesn’t fit with me and leaves me uneasy,

The losses in my life are of a different kind.

 

Mo danced her last dance at the New Moon Club

She was pregnant and made the decision

To save the child growing and alive inside of her.

For a brief hour time seemed to have stood still

As if all the horror of her reality had been taken away.

That night Mo tired quickly and then she was gone

The virulence of the cancer soon took her away

But she’d made sure that the baby lived on.

 

You all came back to stand at her funeral

To remember the days of the brief life

We shared and afterwards we played

The old songs and John played guitar

And I sat and watched you grieve for Mo

Grieving for the loss of a time, and those days.

And one by one you fell asleep flat out on the floor

And I knew in the morning you too would be gone.

 

Published in Uncertain Times 2016 ©RobCullen

Lest we forget

Posted on by celfypridd

Carl von Ossietzky, (born Oct. 3, 1889, Hamburg, Germany —died May 4, 1938, Berlin.

Carl von Ossietzky was  a German journalist and pacifist, winner of the Nobel Prize for Peace for 1935.Ossietzky opposed German Militarism and political extremism of both the left and the right. By the time Hitler became German Chancellor in January 1933, Ossietzky had resumed his editorship, in which he uncompromisingly attacked the Nazis.

Refusing to flee Germany, he was arrested on Feb. 28, 1933, and sent to Esterwegen-Papenburg concentration camp. After enduring three years of incarceration and torture in the camp, Ossietzky was transferred in May 1936 to a prison hospital in Berlin by the German government, which was growing alarmed at the international publicity his case had begun to attract. Ossietzky was mercilessly mistreated by the guards while being deprived of food.

In November 1935, when a representative of the International Red Cross visited Ossietzky, he reported that he saw “a trembling, deadly pale something, a creature that appeared to be without feeling, one eye swollen, teeth knocked out, dragging a broken, badly healed leg . . . a human being who had reached the uttermost limits of what could be borne”.