When You Are Alone - At Sea,

I Wanted A Line In A Poem To Be The Hollow Ney Of The Dervish Orchestra Whose Plaintive Wail Is A Call To God. But All I Achieved Was Awkward Shrieking. Not Even The Pure Shriek Of A Reed In The Rain.

Though The Contradictions Of War Seem Sudden And Simultaneous, History Stalks Before It Strikes. Something Tolerated Soon Becomes Something Good.

Even As A Child, Even As My Blood-past Was Drained From Me, I Understood That If I Were Strong Enough To Accept It, I Was Being Offered A Second History.

When My Parents Were Liberated, Four Years Before I Was Born, They Found That The Ordinary World Outside The Camp Had Been Eradicated. There Was No More Simple Meal, No Thing Was Less Than Extraordinary: A Fork, A Mattress, A Clean Shirt, A Book. Not To Mention Such Things That Can Make One Weep: An Orange, Meat And Vegetables, Hot Water. There Was No Ordinariness To Return To, No Refuge From The Blinding Potency Of Things, An Apple Screaming Its Sweet Juice.

The Truth Doesn't Care What We Think Of It.