Hope and Redemption

These were trying circumstances.
She was not the first person of faith
to tell me she would pray for me
two women temporarily facing insecurity
and the tension of fear. Both of immigrant
stock, a Jew and an Arab, ours was
not a declaration of suffering but a
brief and moving affirmation of life.
Her mother's was lost, a victim of
violence in their small Lebanese town
leaving her motherless and emotionally
vulnerable, this personable, emotively
empathetic woman before me, warmly
hugging away my tears. So I tell her
of my mother in the Pale of Settlement
the family home bombed by Whites
targetting Jews and Reds, father and
brother dead, my mother with shrapnel
impaling her eyes. And my father
a 13-year-old orphan found wandering
the streets of Warsaw, sent off to
Canada to labour as an indentured
farmhand, eventually paying off his
passage. The world as one of strife,
want and pity, ultimately leading to
enduring hope and redemption.