My Neighbour Poem by John a'Beckett

As if they were the stop-press news,
her memoirs out-loud in the street
more urgent than Irak, her eyes fixed
on me hypnotizing back the good old
pre-War days Warszawa, no Bagdad,
my neighbour, Pani Tuszka views
the busy shoppers passing by as I
go listening to her broken phrases, try
to knit the frayed ends of her speech:
whys, replies she had in mind to her
unlistening husband, now deceased,
and chatting Thirties friends, together
- into some patchwork quilt of sense
parts of her life that track back, take
sudden leaps, such snippets from old
cabaret song and jigs on Nowy Swiat
The jig-saw pieces fit. An old Warsaw
comes together, stands alive before us
as some spirit in my fixed attention
makes it “nice” she says “and easier”
for her to talk and let her voice hack
like a pick-axe through the thick pack
of ice, the years, the Soviet amnesia.