Poem about understanding other cultures

Or real curiosity and sympathy and trying to listen to other cultures, subcultures, minorities, humans who have different opinions to us. I still remember with a shudder the businessman I met at a networking meeting in 2009 or so, who said: ‘What’s the need for any cross-cultural awareness training? We all travel nowadays!’

Romanian tradition to welcome your guests with bread and salt. From doxologia.ro

Let Me Help

Your hands pick up, put down, in gestures trained,

your lip curls where a dimple was once placed.

You ignore the salt, the braided bread my family

hands out on a platter.

You wash down their fulsome questions with

my uncles’s plum brandy,

solemnly incline your head, so we can

appreciate your importance

your Western ways.

Let me help you move that suitcase

out of my life

but not too far

not next door

with their political leanings

and teeth of alabaster.

The Greatness of Empire

Singularly inappropriate perhaps for a Monday morning, when we are all ready to attach a new week of work and challenges.  The sun is shining, I am feeling pretty chipper on the whole, but there is always a part of me that responds anxiously to world news…

 

Once the spleen is vented out

When the ghosts are bed to rest

If the sorrow finds its match –

we shall desist.

 

With the seas sucked dry of ripples

Where secret forests live, unfold,

As each phrase falls on waxen ears –

We slacken, curled.

 

An attempt, a jealous grope this,

To woo the caverns of our mind.

Remote echo, no light to blind

The smouldering ruins of our bliss.