First time this has happened!

     I always hate it when students use the vague "this", and here I am using it! Ah, but I want to lure people to read on.

     My "this" is Jim Lundy;s posting that a quote from my poem remained with him, He hosts the Monday Night Poetry & Music at Charleston, South Carolina's Meeting House on East Bay Street, and has shared his own poetry and music there as well. I am grateful and touched that he remembered.

   From Jim's recent Facebook post:

Thanks to Arthur Turfa for this quote that has been on my mind since Monday:

We get homesick
When we leave the homeland
Even if we suffered in it.

 

I replied that the actual quote began "We Slavs..."  The poem recalled a conversation I had with Dr. Rio Preisner during a break in a German Romanticism class at Penn State about Alexander Solzhenitsyn's exile from the Soviet Union. Preisner himself was outside of Czechoslovakia when the Prague Spring ended, and wisely chose not to return. 

   The poem is being considered for publication and I cannot post it here. But I will post a link to Preisner's biogrpahy, which has much more than I knew at the time. I wish I could send him a copy of Places and Times, but I cannot.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rio_Preisner