For this newsletter, Faith Hall (Bosch XXX) submitted the following poem by her aunt Walden S. Morton, a retired high school teacher and poet from Portland, Maine. In the late 1940s she lived in Germany in Bremerhaven and Heidelberg, went to school with wonderful Benedictine nuns and has had a lifelong interest in all things German.
Angela
She is stocky and plain
like everyone's Aunt Lizzie.
She is smart and practical, carved a solution
which rescued the European Union
as well as Greece from financial disaster.
She dresses like a second hand store
in the Age of Advertising.
She repeats her offer to open Germany
to refugees: 800,000 and $6.7 billion
over five years.
She makes the world’s faltering heart sing.
Ordinary people
stop casting their eyes down,
stop mumbling and
clasping their hands in shame.
This is the power of the dream of justice,
slow and painful, obstacles everywhere.
This quiet hard working woman
transforms us, as have
the greatest others of our joint past.
The tuning fork of right and wrong
has been struck and we reverberate
to its song.
She just won the Nobel Peace Prize,
for me.
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