The thin twirled candles neatly planted
around the marzipan Pooh, my daughter puffs
her cheeks, poised to blow
her passage into another age
but is reminded to make
a silent wish. She has traveled
well these six years of her life,
from that trembling ultrasound blip
into the budding beauty brimming
with questions, sometimes an unanswerable
stream, like those yesterday,
when on the SBS news the Beslan crisis
unfolded. Hostage children
and distraught parents, and the world
captive audience, helpless.
Where are they?
A part of Russia the world has never heard of till now.
What is happening?
The naughty people have taken the children.
Why are they crying?
The mothers want the children home.
Will they come home?
I see the children huddled in the hall
and then the dead bodies they will become.

I saw the Holocaust when I was ten,
The World at War, I think,
Olivier's voice going over the aftermath,
grave as his Hamlet. No grownup was there
to face the heap of questions.
That day my mind took its first small step
of a journey that has made me
what I am.

I don't know what my daughter wishes for
but it is quick, unworried
and I squeeze into that second,
into that hanging moment
before she blows the flames out
a lifetime's worry, and a desperate prayer,
as if I were at church
before a candled icon,
for Beslan, for my daughter,
that she will not forget
the questions, will find someday
the ways to bring the children home.