HELLO HELLO HELLO

I'm back. I've been away from Poland for much of the past two months, visiting friends and family in Prague, Berlin, Washington, Virginia, New York, New Jersey, Vermont, and Baltimore. Which is no excuse. But it's sort of a transitional time-- but then, some will rightly say, isn't it always?

So I just wanted to share a short poem I wrote last night. Really it wrote itself. I was watching this report on the Idiot Box about some people in a village in Poland who discovered six years ago that there is an undetonated bomb underneath the house they bought sometime after the war, of which the bomb is a relic. The house where they live.
They've been trying for six years to get someone to help get rid of the bomb without destroying the house which they love and which contains all their stuff, memories etc. But they haven't yet succeeded. I just thought the situation said so much. So the poem is not really a poem. It could be a rock song, or notes toward a novel.


They built their house on a bomb.
They didn't know it was there.
Now they must move, perhaps.
Because the bomb might go off.
Or it might not.
They can't sell the house-- no-one will buy it.
And they can't live there.
But there's no way to move on.
Their whole life is there.