“The Children of Aleppo”

 

The Children of Aleppo

 

There is no childhood in Aleppo.

There are little martyrs-in-the-making

Where 5 year olds and 8 year olds

Wish for a ‘family death’

Where they can die together

With their parents

Where they live in peace in Heaven

Never tasting the fruits of peace on Earth.

 

There is no childhood in Aleppo.

The children haunt the abandoned houses

Of friends who have fled the city.

There they find abandoned teddy bears

While looking for guns for the rebels, their fathers.

 

A dead canary in his cage

Abandoned by its owners

They flee the rockets, bombs

And mortars.

In the face of daily death

The sight of this bird

Evokes a child’s sorrow.

The gunfire outside continues

(They are used to the noise)

And huddle in the pockmarked

Halls until safe to scatter.

 

 

The children of Aleppo

Have no teachers, doctors.

These have fled the cities, schools

But they still pine for ice cream,

For music in the streets,

For curtains not torn by violence,

For books and toys

And gardens and flowers,

For friends that have not died

Innocent blood splattering

The dirty cobble stones

At their feet.

 

The children of Aleppo

Are free and children again

Only in their dreams,

And perhaps, if you believe so,

After death.

 

How do you put back the brains

Of a child in the cup of the shattered skull?

How do you soothe the howls of the mothers

The groans of the fathers in grief?

How do you comfort surviving siblings?

 

The children of Aleppo

Have no future as children.

Suffer the little children here,

They are the sacrifice of parents

And factions,

And politicians

All with the blood of

10,000 children

Who have died

In a country torn

By immeasurable violence.

 

The beautiful children of Aleppo

Like children everywhere

Still want to chase each other

In the gardens, on playgrounds,

Want to dance in the streets,

Want to pluck flowers for their mothers

And they still pine for ice cream.

 

Jane Kohut-Bartels

Copyrighted, 2014-2016

Yesterday a bombing of a hospital in Quetta, Pakistan.  Today the children of Aleppo still have no water, food or secure escape from a city that is pulled apart by violent forces of war.  How many children will be sacrificed? The children of the Holocaust and the Muslim children today are our ‘lost’ generation.  Muslim and Jew, no difference, death is not picky.

“The Children of Aleppo”

 

 

–

Reading this morning the never ending terror and violence done by Muslims in Europe and around the world makes me wonder where it all will end.  Obviously in Civil War and then probably in WWIII.  The real victims of war, civil war, etc., are  children.  It is always the children who suffer the most.  In our hatred for what adults do, we must remember the children who are innocent of such terror.

Lady Nyo

–

The Children of Aleppo

 

There is no childhood in Aleppo.

There are little martyrs-in-the-making

Where 5 year olds and 8 year olds

Wish for a ‘family death’

Where they can die together

With their parents

Where they live in peace in Heaven

Never tasting the fruits of peace on Earth.

 

There is no childhood in Aleppo.

The children haunt the abandoned houses

Of friends who have fled the city.

There they find abandoned teddy bears

While looking for guns for the rebels, their fathers.

 

“Oh, the poor thing!”

A dead canary in his cage

Abandoned by its owners

They flee the rockets, bombs

And mortars.

In the face of daily death

The sight of this bird

Evokes a child’s sorrow.

But the gunfire outside continues

(They are used to the noise)

And huddle in the pockmarked

Halls until safe to scatter.

 

 

The children of Aleppo

Have no teachers, doctors.

These have fled the cities, schools

But they still pine for ice cream,

For music in the streets,

For curtains not torn by violence,

For books and toys

And gardens and flowers,

For friends that have not died

Innocent blood splattering

The dirty cobble stones

At their feet.

 

The children of Aleppo

Are free and children again

Only in their dreams,

And perhaps, if you believe so,

After death.

 

How do you put back the brains

Of a child in the cup of the shattered skull?

How do you soothe the howls of the mothers

The groans of the fathers in grief?

How do you comfort the left-alive siblings?

 

The children of Aleppo

Have no future as children.

Suffer the little children here,

They are the sacrifice of parents

And factions,

And politicians

All with the blood of

10,000 children

Who have died

In a country torn

By immeasurable violence.

 

The beautiful children of Aleppo

Like children everywhere

Still want to chase each other

In the gardens, on playgrounds,

Want to dance in the streets,

Want to pluck flowers for their mothers

And they still pine for ice cream.

 

Jane Kohut-Bartels

Copyrighted, 2014-2016

 

 

 

 

 

 

“The Children of Aleppo”, poem

–

Suffer the little children……

–

The Children of Aleppo

–

 

There is no childhood in Aleppo.

There are little martyrs-in-the-making

Where 5 year olds and 8 year olds

Wish for a ‘family death’

Where they can die together

With their parents

Where they live in peace in Heaven

Never tasting the fruits of peace on Earth.

–

There is no childhood in Aleppo.

The children haunt the abandoned dwellings

Of friends who have fled the city.

There they find abandoned teddy bears

While looking for guns for the rebels, their fathers.

–

A dead canary in his cage

“Oh, the poor thing!”

Abandoned by its owners

As they flee the rockets, bombs

And mortars,

In the face of daily death,

The sight of this bird

Evokes a child’s sorrow.

But the gunfire outside continues

(They are used to the noise)

And huddle in the pockmarked

Halls until safe to scatter

-.

The children of Aleppo

Have no teachers, doctors.

These have fled the cities, schools

But they still pine for ice cream,

For music in the streets,

For curtains not torn by violence,

For books and toys

And gardens and flowers,

For friends that have not died

Innocent blood splattering

The dirty cobble stones

At their feet.

–

The children of Aleppo

Are free and children again

Only in their dreams,

And perhaps, if you believe so,

After death.

–

How do you put back the brains

Of a child in the cup of the shattered skull?

How do you soothe the howls of the mothers,

The groans of the fathers in grief?

How do you comfort the left-alive siblings?

–

The children of Aleppo

Have no future as children.

Suffer the little children,

They are the sacrifice of parents

And factions

And politicians

All with the blood of

10,000 children

Who have died

In a country torn

By immeasurable violence.

–

The beautiful children of Aleppo

Like children everywhere

Still want to chase each other

In the gardens, on playgrounds,

Want to dance in the streets,

Want to pluck flowers for their mothers

And they still pine for ice cream.

–

Jane Kohut-Bartels

Copyrighted, 2014-2015, originally published in “Pitcher of Moon”, 2014, Amazon.com, by Jane Kohut-Bartels

A Christmas Miracle and I Can’t Stop Smiling!

This will be a very special Holiday for us. We have one child, now off in the Navy, and for the past few years, Xmas has been rather bleak.  We haven’t even put up a tree.

This year promises a whole different holiday.  During the summer,  my husband’s son, Christopher, 29, came to visit for the first time.  Christopher works in Washington, DC, in the US Patent Office, as a Intellectual Properties Investigator. Three years ago he became a Mormon.

We haven’t seen this child in decades. Divorce can take its nasty toll on so many things, and  children are usually on the front lines.  We had just given up ever knowing this child.  But in through our front door Christopher walked and it was love at first sight.  He is a tall, handsome young man, and funny to boot.  He kept his arm around me and his father and it seemed that talking to Christopher was talking to my husband. They were so much alike.  The mystery of DNA will always startle me.

The last time I saw Christopher he was not even two years old….and still in his crib.  So seeing this beautiful young man who was so much an issue of anger and strife between his parents was a shock.  For some unknown reason, this meeting had nothing of awkwardness or strangeness.  It was just a father, son and step-mother having dinner and getting to know the other.  It was just an unexpected joy for me.

Our son in the Navy, also named Christopher (just 24), met the other Christopher this summer, and they have spent as much time together as possible.  He is an only child, and said to me recently: “Finally I get the sibling I wanted, no thanks to you, Mom.”  LOL!

They spent Thanksgiving up at Christopher’s and that was wonderful,  the mother down here, worried that her child would not have a holiday dinner, except the hard tack or whatever they eat in the Navy these days.

Friday night we were at a holiday party in the neighborhood.  It was held at a new venue for our neighborhood, an internet cafe, apparently owned by the Japanese. It is run by a woman who lived for many years in Japan and speaks fluent Japanese.  They are putting these cafes all over the country I have been told.  This was a lovely new venue for our neighborhood, and we were having a great time.  My husband Fred got a phone call from his son, and BOTH our Christophers are coming home for Xmas on a long road trip together from up there.

I haven’t been able to stop smiling since Friday.  I tore the house apart upstairs yesterday, can barely move this morning, giving up my large studio and office to make a ‘dorm’ for the ‘boys’.  I took another smaller bedroom and sqeezed my stuff in there.   I am so happy to have this task to do, and this ’empty nest’ stuff goes just so far.  It’s damn lonely actually, and having the sound and laughter of two young men, both related, in the house at Christmas will be the best gift of all. I have heard them on the phone, talking to each other, laughing and giggling, both computer nerds, and having that in our lives, even for a short visit at Christmas will mean so much to both of us.  Plus the wood pile will grow with two additional axes this winter.

Life is never predictable. We never thought this Holiday visit would be possible.  But life is also an ever-changing blessing.

Lady Nyo

A REASON FOR THE SEASON  

 

  I saw the Cooper’s hawk this morning. She landed on the chimney pot, probably looking for my miniature hen, Grayson.  Four years ago she was a starved fledging who mantled over while I fed her cold chicken.  She’s back this holiday, my spirits lifting. A good Christmas present.

   In the middle of the commercialization of the season, Nature closes the gap.  I have noticed squirrels with pecans in mouths leaping the trees, hawks hunting low over now-bare woods, unknown song birds sitting on fences, heard the migration of Sandhill cranes as they honk in formation. You hear their cacophony well before they appear. 

   There is brightness to the holly, washed by our early winter rains and the orange of the nandina berries has turned crimson. Smell of wood smoke in the air and the crispness of morning means some of nature is going to sleep. We humans should reclaim our past and join the slumber party of our brother bears.

   Jingle Bells will fade and our tension with it. Looking towards deep winter when the Earth is again silent will restore our balance and calm nerves with a blanket of peace.

Jane Kohut-Bartels

Copyrighted, 2009, 2011

A Thanksgiving Memory

Happy Thanksgiving!

My father was a tender man.  He came back from WWII, from the Pacific Rim, probably shell shocked, certainly a pacifist.

It was somewhere in the  50’s.    My parents had bought their dream house: a very old, and badly- needing- restoration pre-Revolutionary War house.  My father, along with my 9 months pregnant mother, moved into this house and began the necessary restoration.  I remember my brother and I were bedded down in what was to be the dining room.

Both my parents were biting off probably more than they could chew with this property.  There were two barns, a few sheds, and lo and behold!  An outhouse.  That was the toilet…the only toilet.

My mother, being city bred, and also so heavily pregnant, refused to use that black walnut-built two seater outhouse, and since it was already winter, who could blame her?  My father worked nights  putting in a proper bathroom, and peace reigned again.  Sort of.

(Black walnut is beautiful wood, and since they were surrounded with acres of it, that particular wood was used for just about everything, including the beautiful curving banister in the front hall.  My father also tore apart the outhouse and used some of the wood in constructing a cabinet under the back staircase,  accessible from the kitchen.  It was a great place for us to play hide and seek as children.)

Thanksgiving was coming one year, and my father decided he would buy a live turkey, fatten it up and slaughter it for the day.  I vaguely remember going with him one night, when it was already dark and cold,  and what I remember was  a very large, dark room, lit by a bare bulb hardly casting light  on the proceedings.  If I remember correctly, it probably was a poultry farm somewhere in Middlesex County, probably in Millstone.  Back in the 50’s and 60’s, five miles from Princeton, all of this area was farm country.  Very old, English, Scottish then Dutch countryside with huge acreage of farms, dairy and grains.

So my father brings home a live turkey, and with two  kids and a toddler, he thinks he is going to make “Tom” dinner.

My father soon realized  his now-country- bred children had made friends with Tom and the idea of eating a friend, well, this wasn’t on the menu for us kids.

My mother wasn’t about to pluck or clean a turkey.  She was a nurse and ballet dancer and hadn’t education in this.  She didn’t like to even touch fish to be cooked.

So Tom went to Ham MacDonald in Rocky Hill.  He had 12 children and I am sure Tom served the purpose he was bred for very nicely there.

My father went to his friend in Millstone, Chester, who was a  butcher, and got a goose.  I think he decided on goose because of the quick disappearance of Tom and he knew any turkey carcass showing up on a plate would have been suspect.

So that  Thanksgiving we had goose, which was rather strange because Thanksgiving wasn’t called “Goose Day”.

My father was a tender man.  Perhaps WWII and the times had made him tender.  Perhaps having children made him see life through our eyes.  Some men become harder faced with life.  I think it was because of his nature.  He practiced compassion, even to the sensitivities of children.

Happy Thanksgiving!

Jane Kohut-Bartels

Violins and Head Wounds, Part II

I’ve already heard from some friends asking me where I got this ‘Head Wound’ part.  Well, it’s not entirely original to me.  I did suffer the usual head wounds of childhood, being dropped on my head by my mother, the single knuckle rap on the top  of my head by my father (the full extent of his discipline), the usual galloping beneath low lying limbs on my horse and getting bonked that way, but nothing really serious.  Perhaps that flying hockey puck to the back of the head on Madsen’s pond was the more serious injury of this period.  The bugle event was to the FRONT of the head, so that was special.

However, “Head Wound Hannah” was the sobriquet we gave to a woman we worked with at Emory University.  This was 15 years ago so perhaps she has changed.  We can only hope so.  This poor woman was so ditzy, so ‘childlike’, so…well, plain DENSE, we made up this story  she had suffered a head wound, probably from a riding accident, just to curb our anger at her…..embarrassing us.  We were creative, not kind.

However, there are these little ‘related posts’ that are fun to read after you post a blog entry, and so I did today and one story really moved me.  It was about a young woman who started violin at 4 and realized  around high school  it had eaten up her personality.  She skimped on everything else, including school work and probably social life to attend to this bitch violin.

I laughed  when I read:  “Only practice on those days you eat”.  I remember that one.

This article made me think about our only child.  He didn’t speak much at 3 years, and that is because he was adopted by us just at that age.  He came from a bad situation.  We didn’t know how to be parents, but we tried different things.  The only thing I could think of was food and music.

He was very tiny, only 24 lbs. at 3 years.  So we feed him three breakfasts…..one upon waking, one on the way to daycare next to the university where I worked, and his breakfast at the daycare.  I got fat, he just grew upward.  He  still didn’t talk much after a few months with us, but one day, snug in the back seat in his carseat, we were listening to music on NPR.

“Oh, Christopher! This is possibly  Mozart”,  I said, trying to interest him.

“Probably Haydn, Mommy.”

I almost wrecked the car.  And he was right.  Soon after I was talking to a child psychologist about our son, and she also was gifted in music.  Apparently children under the age of six…or until that age, have a remarkably keen ability to distinguish tonal patterns in music, and thereby can identify (in some cases) composers and pieces.

That settled it.  We would develop a little musician, and then he would blossom.  Yes, into a little monster until we all wised up.

We started with a tiny Suzuki violin.  Lunch was mommy and son in the conference room doing scales.  He was almost 4 and tiny, with tiny hands.  That Suzuki was an 1/8 of a violin.  He composed the “Dragon Opera” at 4, which was a hideous group of discordant notes and chords.  It was a “DRAGON”.  Of course, we finally got it.

Later he got a 3/4 violin, a couple of them.  We just collected 3/4 violins for some reason.  Not that any of them were better than the last, but we had about 3 hanging around. We could have made planters, but didn’t.

When our son started First Grade, we got a call from the principal.  That was the time period when schools still had music and instruments for children to try out.  There were two cellos and one kid had put his foot through one.  We were informed that our son was crying hysterically, with his arms wrapped around the remaining cello and he refusing to let go.  Luckily I could walk to school, and usually did, and retrieved our son with his big, wet eyes.

We promised him a cello, but it was years before he got one.  He then fell in love with piano….and we bought him a very old and heavy baby grand which still occupies a portion of the front living room.

He had a remarkable ear, and went through two teachers in a year.  One just disappeared (he was a trombone player anyway) and the other, a woman, was excellent.  Christopher couldn’t really read music, but picked up a large part of Mozart’s  “A Little Night Music” by playing it on the cd over and over until he had the pattern down pat.

He was a perfectionist and a grunter.  He would practice scales over and over, and get really fast on this very hard to play piano.  Hard to play because the action was heavy, not light and responsive like a more modern piano.  Our piano was from the 1920’s or so.  But an excellent sound because it was used as a concert instrument in a very small hall.   Dense, walnut and honey sound…just hard on the fingers.  You got really strong playing it.

He gave a couple of concerts to nice and quiet adults.  The Mennonite Church was a favorite place for concerts and he played some Mozart perfectly, and also an amazing A-B-A piece he composed when he was around 8.  I can still remember that piece, because it was very atmospheric….like snow falling…Beautiful.  Of course, his music teacher had to write it down, because he still couldn’t really read music, except for the Mozart he was learning.

His first competition was a scream.  Our 9 year old son was going to do the rather well rehearsed Mozart piece and his own composition, when a beautiful Korean girl played before him.  She was incredible.  He was so in love with her playing, and her image up on the stage, that it rattled him severely.  He got through 1/2 his Mozart, and started to stumble and walked off the stage in mid flight.  I was horrified and he was in tears.  Took a while for him to explain what happened, but it was a lesson to all of us.  Don’t play AFTER the Korean girl.

I did my own concerts for about 10 years, until around 2004.  I had my own accompanist, Dr. Guy Benian at Emory, a fantastic musician and one I worked with almost exclusively for those years.  But life changesd and I started to feel guilty about all the rehearsal time away from my young son, and I quit.  Other things came to the fore, like writing, so it was time.

We did attend some harpischord seminars those years, because I was also doing some very early music, and Christopher loved the harpischord.  The action is so damn easy with those instruments, and you fly over the keys.  And two keyboards to play with on the doubles.  We thought about buying a harpischord…and I even helped build one decades ago in college, but they are tempemental instruments and they really are hot house things.  One would have perished fast in our house. The cats themselves would have killed it.

However, Christopher still did my vocal warm up scales, and he was a demon.  He worked me hard most mornings, and we are thinking about going back to this a bit this summer.  We have to do it soon because he is off to Navy training in December this year for 4 years.

He got his cello about 5 years ago.  My brother, who plays the oud, lute, guitar, violin, piano, cello, etc.  …every stringed instrument…and a 12 string guitar, gave us a beautiful student cello from the 1940’s.  Japanese made, so I think it is a bit earlier. But it has a wonderful sound, deep, rich chocolate, a bellow like a bull, and except where the music hating cats knocked it off it’s stand and displaced the neckboard, it is a wonderful instrument.  However, we keep breaking strings, and I think it’s the repair job we did ourselves.  My brother thinks we are trying to tune it like a viola.  Perhaps he is right.

Our son took to the cello like a duck to the water.  And damn, if that isn’t a hard instrument to play.  It gets your fingers fast….they plumb hurt.  But he flies through  scales, and we play little …kinda….duets….me on the hated violin and he on cello.

He recovered his speech soon enough and I like to think that the music was key here.  I know that he has become very mouthy.  Perhaps it’s all in the plan.

Lady Nyo