Jazz Doctor: Milford Graves
His playful eyes are framed by a bearded face.
The energy comes through the roots, he says.
If you cut the stems, you're truncating power.
His place exhales an alchemical aura.
A stairway painted in bright rainbow colors
leads to the music research laboratory.
Next to it, in the lavish garden citrus trees
grow amidst healing herbs and exotic plants.
The walls of the house are covered
with a rococo of mosaic stones,
pieces of reflective metal
and chunks of discarded marble
that stand apart from the gritty character
of the 110th Avenue in Queens.
The basement glares in psychedelic colors.
The interior is filled with musical instruments
computers, electronic stethoscopes,
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poem by Paul Hartal
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Ode To Irena Sendler
Her photo stares at me dreamy and melancholic
Like golden October leaves against a cloudy sky.
She bends gently her oval head towards her right shoulder
That carries the anguished burden of the world.
The parted dark hair in the center is combed back
Into a bun adorning a charming face.
And she looks with tender caring eyes,
A countenance more enigmatic than of the Mona Lisa.
Irena Sendler, née Krzyzanowska,
Polish Catholic social worker with a loving heart,
A gracious woman of valor and compassion
A brave humanitarian and Righteous of the Nations,
The rescuer of children from the Warsaw Ghetto
I bow my head and salute you.
What was the source of your towering magnanimity?
Where did you find the moral strength for what you did?
She was born in 1910 in Otwock,25 km southeast
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poem by Paul Hartal
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Meeting in Belsen
For Anne Frank (1929-1945) .
One day in the autumn of 1944,
Along with your sister Margot,
You were deported from Auschwitz
to Bergen-Belsen.
When you arrived in the camp
the barracks were full,
so for several weeks
you lived in a crowded tent.
Unlike in Auschwitz,
there were no gas chambers in Belsen,
just shouting SS guards with dogs,
watch towers and barbed wire fence,
starvation and disease,
living skeletons of prisoners
tottering around like ghosts.
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poem by Paul Hartal
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The White Rose of Stalingrad
Her nickname was Lilya.
In the Great Patriotic War
When Hitler’s armies invaded the Soviet Union
She became a Soviet air ace,
Known as the “White Rose of Stalingrad”.
Lydia Litvak was born
Into a Moscow Jewish family.
In 1935, at the age of 14, she joined a flight club
And a year later she had her first solo flight.
When the Germans attacked Russia,
Lilya joined the Soviet Air Force.
In the summer of 1942 she was assigned
To the 437th Combat Regiment
Fighting over the skies of Stalingrad.
At first the men were reluctant
To take her seriously
But soon it became evident
That she was an excellent pilot.
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poem by Paul Hartal
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A Prisoner of Sobibor
On an early autumn day
a train coming from Minsk rolled
into the railway station of Sobibor,
a village in the Lublin district of Poland.
The passengers of the train
were unaware that the outskirts
of this dusty small town
concealed a dreadful Nazi death camp
where gas chambers poisoned victims
with carbon monoxide.
It was September 23,1943,
and a Soviet prisoner of war,
First Lieutenant Alexander Pechersky
was also in one of the boxcars
of the deported Jews.
His mind in captivity
wandered restlessly.
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poem by Paul Hartal
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The Dalai Lama Who Loved Wine, Women and Song
Here the May lilacs blossom in the garden
Their fragrance sprawls in the air of spring.
Yet my mind drifts on wings of a daydream
To a far away land of peach-treed valleys
Embraced by snow-capped mountains.
One night there on the Roof of the Earth
A young man in the holy city of Lhasa
Listened to the chanting of mantras
Not for the sake of enlightenment
But in order to sense her breath.
That month he span all the pray wheels
Not for the sake of freeing his soul
But in order to touch her finger prints.
That year he prostrated on the ground
With his hands clasping the earth
Not for the sake of adoring Buddha
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poem by Paul Hartal
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The Royal Air Force Hero and the Luftwaffe General
Britain fought for her life.
Hitler’s armies prepared
For an invasion of England.
Savage air battles took place
Over the skies of Albion.
Then a miracle happened:
In the summer and autumn of 1940
The Royal Air Force defeated
The numerically superior Luftwaffe.
This was a turning point in the war.
Lacking adequate air support,
The Fuehrer could not carry out
His invasion plans.
Deeply touched by the heroism
Of the pilots, Winston Churchill said:
“Never in the field of human conflict
Was so much owed by so many
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poem by Paul Hartal
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Honor and Betrayal (Jiangsu 1937-1945)
The bamboo leaves swished in the wind
As Lieutenant Ryouta Takahashi said goodbye
To his wife and son.
He made his way to the port
With measured steps,
His mind thick with heavy thoughts.
On route
To reinforce the Japanese garrison in Shanghai
The convoy set sail
From the Sasebo Naval Arsenal
In Nagasaki Prefecture.
It was part of the 3rd expeditionary fleet
Of the Imperial Japanese Navy
Consisting of a dozen cruisers and gunboats.
Their mission was to patrol the coasts
And river ways of China and to give support
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poem by Paul Hartal
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The Restaurant Keeper
In the City of Toronto there was once
a restaurant owned by a man named Imre Finta.
Born in 1912 in Austria-Hungary, Finta spent
his years of youth in my hometown Szeged,
immigrating to Canada after the Second World War.
Settling in Toronto, in 1953 Finta bought
the Candlelight Restaurant but it did not go well,
so he closed it. Then he opened The Moulin Rouge
on Avenue Road at DuPont Street.
The old fashioned Hungarian gentleman greeted
his guests warmly, politely kissing the right hand
of his female patrons.
I had never dined at the Moulin Rouge
but I encountered Finta in a brickyard and
at the railway station of Szeged in the summer
of 1944. At that time I was eight years old
and Finta, aged 32, was a Captain
of the Royal Hungarian Gendarmerie.
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poem by Paul Hartal
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Voyage around the Square Root of Minus One
I often heard
that while the sciences concern themselves
with objective truths
the arts deal with subjective phenomena.
Many years ago I held the same view,
but later came to the conclusion
that this is just a well-combed popular myth.
It is an untenable credo
because the sharp separation
of the arts and sciences is a rigid
and arbitrary mandate, full of holes.
Although all subjects have their specificities,
at the same time they also share
many common traits with each other.
There is art in science and science in art.
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poem by Paul Hartal
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