Danny Karlin

My memories of my mother are dominated now, at this moment, by the intensity of my bearing witness to her dying, to the point where I find it hard to think of her in any other aspect.  I know this won't last, but it means I can't really sum up what she meant to me over the whole course of my life, and yet it would be wrong to allow these recent images, so painfully compounded of weakness and tenacity, of bravery and indignity, to be the ones I evoke in this place.  Although she was not a religious person, she belonged to the Jewish tradition whose keyword is not death but life.  It say in the Bible, in Psalm 116, 'I will walk before the Lord in the land of the living,' and that is how I would wish to think of Mummy.  So I am taking refuge in a different kind of intensity, which belongs to my children and my earliest, not my latest memories.  A month before she died, I set down some these memories in a poem, because that represents for me the idea of structure and permanence - at least such permanence as we are granted.  And I found that what flowed into this structure were physical memories - touch, taste, smell - and that these fragile but potent traces of my mother's presence in my life were the ones I could conjure with, the ones by whose aid I could, so to speak, restore her to life.  I remembered this beautiful, elegant, distant figure, bending over my bed in a cloud of perfume to say goodnight before going out for the evening with Daddy.  I remembered the touch of her fur coats - a whole wardrobe filled with them, mink and beaver in those untroubled times.  I remembered the intonations of her voice, both in Hebrew and English.  (Mummy spoke modern Hebrew at home, and Daddy spoke ancient Hebrew in the synagogue.  Both were utterly unintelligible to me.)  These are the kinds of things that flowed into my poem, my structure, and in them some of what I feel - love, anger, yearning, remorse, forgiveness - seems bound up,  So this is all I have to say now, in memory of my mother.

My childhood passed beneath a cloud
        —Chanel No.5—
You left it late to say goodnight

You did your best with Daddy dead—
        Creamy scrambled eggs;
My childhood passed beneath a cloud.

Inside you wardrobe, stroked your furs,
        —Felt them murmur;
"She left it late to say goodnight."

Hebrew for secrets, English scorn:
        Just unspeakable!
My childhood passed beneath a cloud.

Your fathomless dark glasses showed
         Depths to your plight:
There's nothing now beneath this cloud;
I've left it late to say goodnight.