MY POEM '"TO ALBERT EINSTIEN "

                                                                    

(Avtar Mota outside the House of Albert Einstein on Mercer Street in Princeton, USA  ..Year 2018)

(To Albert Einstein)

If you are a gem born of eternity,

I am the dust that remembers the feet that walked over it.

If you are a mountain carrying the sky,

I am the trembling pebble at your feet.

My smallness cannot climb your vastness,

Cannot touch your towering mind,

Not by distance,

Not by language,

Not by any measure this world allows.

And yet I have to  say this to you ;

Across centuries and silences,

One wound beats the same in us both.

You were torn from the soil that named you,

Driven from the home that shaped your breath.

I, too, walk with a homeland folded like a scar inside my chest.

But exile is the same cold night whether it falls on a giant or on the smallest soul.

So, I speak to you not as an equal,

But as one broken compass to another,

Both of us still pointing endlessly,

Towards a home that no longer exists.

 

(Avtar Mota )

 

PS

In January 1933, Hitler became Chancellor of Germany. The Nazi regime quickly began persecuting Jews and political opponents. As a Jewish intellectual, Einstein was a direct target. Nazi propaganda attacked him and labelled his work as “Jewish physics”.The Nazis confiscated his property and put a bounty on his head. While Einstein was travelling abroad, the Nazis raided his Berlin home. Realising it was no longer safe to return, he decided to leave permanently. Einstein moved to the United States, where he accepted a position at the Institute for Advanced Study in Princeton, New Jersey, and remained there until he died in 1955.

 

 

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