Copii

When we encounter a friend long unseen,

it is rather like the feeling we have when,

being driven in a car, we mount a steep, short bridge:

a joy leaps up

and takes us by surprise, and we cannot help smiling.

Language can be like this too: we hear words

we have learned but not studied or spoke

in some time, and unexpected recognition

buoys us up, 

and we smile and think ‘Ah! I know you.’

Sometimes we hear the same word, 

or one very like it, in a language which is kin

to one we’ve learned, and a smile even wilder

rises up

to see the other doors our old key could unlock.

I smiled that way in the library,

unexpected and involuntary

when I heard the Roma speaker say

copii

which I knew, in Romanian, means children.

I cried at the translation

Of the words in the sentence I didn’t know:

One thousand. In a lake. Drowned.

(Note: this poem was inspired by a Roma Resistance Day event at the Kittiwake Trust Multilingual Library earlier this year, organised by members of the Roma Holocaust Memorial Initiative, who campaign to build a memorial in Newcastle to the Roma victims of the Holocaust)