Prague

Our hotel was a dozen or more tram stops

from Prague’s city centre. Converted

from a Soviet-era apartment block

to cater for the influx of tourists

after the Velvet Revolution,

it faced a large rectangle of open ground,

flat and bare. On the other three sides

were similar blocks, but still used for families.

In the middle was a small carousel

and, to one side, a mobile shop selling

alcohol and cigarettes – Freedom’s

enterprising dividends. The hotel

welcomed groups – like the excited party

of Israeli High School students and teachers,

with their Mossad minders, jackets bulging,

waiting in the foyer, as we arrived,

for coaches to take them to the Ghetto.

                               ***

Hitler declared that the Ghetto be preserved –

once Prague had been pronounced wholly ‘Judenrein’ –

as if an exhibit in a museum.

In the Old Jewish Cemetery,

along the horizontal edges 

of the tomb of the scholar and mystic

Rabbi Judah Levai ben Bezalel

aka Rabbi Loew small stones rest.

According to German Jewish folklore

the Rabbi could conjure, in times of trouble,

a redemptive golem out of the mud

and clay of the wide Vlatava close by.

When the city was part of the Habsburg

Empire, because of its many gilded

cupolas, it was ‘Das Goldene Stadt’.

                                 ***

Our room overlooked the open ground.

Adults were queuing at the shop, and

children turning on the roundabout. We could hear

its generator’s wheezy chug-chug,

and the tinkling of a waltz. On its roof

were clumsy images of clowns painted

in a faded yellow. The street lamps came on.

Snow began to fall as the coaches returned,

their passengers subdued.