This is from a book of poetry written by Bart Wolffe in the past few years of a personal displacement from Africa to England to Germany and back to England, from a loss of language, family and identity to the struggle to find new roots again and again.DISPLACED
Imperceptibly, life changes shape.
The faces seem familiar
But the names escape me
Like forgotten addresses.
I find myself drawn to those vanquished;
Stories behind the masks upon the street
Of the defeated homeless,
The bag lady so like my mother
And the sorrow insidiously overpowers.
Even my God has changed his shape.
He no longer answers to counter fear
That, I too, will be dispossessed.
For the warmth has seeped out the brain
Which held me in my summer Africa
And the heating bills remind the chill
Will not be denied inside.
This London weather of the colder mind
Mostly unwelcomes strangers
As I find myself to be
Without belonging once again.
The long defeat and the downward path
Is increasing velocity of no return
Up the hill that once was home
To refuge in the sun.
As darkness falls and the sirens scream
The loss, the fall, decline.
Insidiously, time strikes dead beat
Upon my lost head in loveless rhyme.
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