Once, my love, you wrote,
'We lived in a Mother and Child Home
in Jaffa for a time.'
You saw little
of your soldier father,
more of the nuns.
You told me people were kind,
you picked up a bit of Arabic -
then you left in a big old ship.
'I came to England in ‘47
and was in camps in Yorkshire and Wales …'
Your story moves on.
But the nurses, the carers,
the children you’d played with,
where are they now?
Their children, grandchildren,
their great-grandchildren,
where are they now?
Where are they now?
- Quotations from Maria Lis-Balchin, The Life of Maria (private memoir).
This composition is published as part of our Refugee: Poems of Courage collection, presented in collaboration with Poems Not Bombs, part of the Forest Poets collective.
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