Travel Poems - My Journey

About the Book

The comments below provide a framework for reading this book. Ultimately, regardless of time and place, each poem’s “truth” can be measured by the feelings engendered and the poet’s response to the humors of the Muse. Travel for me has been the realization of childhood romantic fantasies. My mother devoured Richard Halliburton’s travel adventures. My fifth-grade teacher used to bring in her travel notebooks as part of our Friday morning exposure to the world, sessions that included the Walter Damrosch radio concerts. There were shipboard farewell parties, when family members sailed to England and the continent; letters and photos from distant European cousins; eavesdropping on conversations about the “old country”. On my first job as an office-boy, I delivered a bottle of champagne to a first-class cabin on the Normandie. There followed the exotic, mysterious worlds of adventure portrayed by Conrad and Kipling; and later, there were brushes with the travel classics of Goethe, James, Adams, Mark Twain—and with the European tradition (and that of rich Americans) of completing one’s education by traveling abroad. My wife Edythe and I sustained this romantic sense of travel, of entering the unexpected. Each day was eagerly anticipated. This was a time before TV, virtual reality, and the travel industry eliminated some of the unknowns, before the speed of the plane and the comfort of the ship put tours into time straitjackets, affecting the opportunity to pause and explore, to feel and see. I wrote my first line of poetry after I retired twenty-seven years ago. The 1970s and early 1980s were for us a period of great expectations—a world of emerging and awakening realities when it was hoped that each person would have the opportunity to understand his history, her present, and the potentials of the future: · India, after Ghandi and Nehru and the adoption of a secular constitution. · China, after the death of Mao and the failures of the Cultural Revolution. · Israel, after the Yom Kippur war of 1973. · For us “easterners,” the special enchantments of California, the wondrous expanses of Colorado, Arizona, and Oregon, Indian lore, and the other ocean. Generally, each section of this book refers to a single trip. Each poem is my reaction to a specific place, occurrence, or person at a particular time. All the poems are titled, and the places are identified and dated so that each may be better understood. The poems also tell the story of my personal journey during this period. Did I learn more about myself when reaching out to write about others? Various “tales,” “translations,” and “sayings” are my own creations––devices of expression. Jokes are those that circulated during trips, in a bus, an airport, a dining table. I am “obsessed” with the nature of time. While time is often a guest, invited or uninvited to the poet’s table, the fare is directly or implicitly about past, current, or farther time. The carefully planned tours to India, Nepal, and China (via the Philippines) provided perspectives that were from the “ruling class”—older university professors as local guides in India, younger university-trained chaperones in the employ of the government bureaucracy. The mission to Israel was sponsored by the Anti-Defamation League (ADL) and included a stop in Rumania on the return flight. It was a busy and emotional trip, meeting with members of the Knesset, the President, an air force general, kibbutzniks, mayors, museum directors, etc. We toured the entire country. Israel was presented in its most favorable light, against the dark history of the Holocaust and the problems of survival in a hostile Arab world. (We revisited Israel, via Egypt and Jordan, in 1988, under the auspices of the American Professors for Peace in the Middle East. Some short poems are appended to this Israeli section.) Although Edythe and I toured extensively in Europe (Great Britain, France, The Netherlands, Italy and Sicily, Austria, behin

About the Author

Born in 1918, I am a product of New York City and its school systems: Richmond Hill H.S. (1934), CCNY (1938), School of Business, Columbia (1939), continuing graduate studies at Columbia and the New School. After thirty years as a partner in Hertz, Herson & Company, CPAs, I retired in 1974. On my first trip thereafter, I composed my first poem. I currently live with my family in western New Jersey. My work as a foundation trustee of the Bruner Foundation led to co-writing Accounting: A Social Institution—A Unified Theory for Measurement of the Profit and Nonprofit Sectors (1992).