TRIBUTE TO HANS

REMEMBERING HANS

TRIBUTE TO HANS

You are that old cop who feels all right
with Mercy all through every night
or day, when her quality unstrained
still means sister Justice is not pained
with that correctness members of the new school
of the unschooled learn from the cruel
left (where they pack their holster).
You are the Kind who remembers the spade
called the spade; today Robert Peels bolster
the transfer of all power to those paid
by Alien. Alienated from the symbiotic
understanding-belonging of town to man
and man to town which the right cop nurses,
the left cop nurtures only the chaotic
pride of rebellion which sent Satan
into his pitted hell of heated curses…

But you understood the spirit to the law
left behind by the left cop’s ascendancies
from his people, and, yes, he will draw
the gun to cuff and shackle as he fancies
while you’d rather charm those orang-utans back
to their cages, compassion your lure.
The left cop will gladly number the arm
of the innocent, but you refused to crack
the trigger even permanently to cure
Red Ryan from bringing further harm.

Your back against the law is love. [Copyright © 1974, 2004, 2009 K’lakokum]

     Kangaroo Poet Karol Hans Jewinski passed away early in 2007 near his home in Jerusalem, at the age of 100.  He was still full of vigour, and had the physical appearance of a normal man in his late fifties.  Indeed, Karol fully expected to live at least 120 years, and would have, had he not become the innocent victim of a suicide bomber while shopping near his home.  Hans, as he preferred to be called, was a follower of Gjorg von Harten who, eight centuries ago, lived to the astounding age of 147, repeatedly proclaiming that everybody should expect to live at least 120 years.  Gjorg’s Ten Rules for Living a Century have been handed down by word of mouth from generation to generation, and 52 of his descendants have been documented to have lived at least 100 years, with another 40 probably doing so as well, but without proper supporting documentation. 

     As a young boy in rural Poland, Hans was allowed to adopt an abandoned and sick wolf cub.  The Jewinski farm was in the neighbourhood of Yvan Pavlov’s laboratory, and when the young lad consulted Pavlov about care for the wolf, he obtained his first job – cleaning out Pavlov’s dog kennels.  Often he did not receive payment for this work, because Pavlov was chronically broke until two decades later when his “science” was adopted by official Communism, and the Reds financed a little empire for him.  Hans became a life-long dog lover, and was always accompanied by a German Shepherd.

     When Hans’ father died suddenly, the lad was given into custody of an orthodox uncle in St. Petersburg.  This uncle, a German Jew, was a rabbi who made Hans fully acquainted with the Jewish faith (not taught to him earlier by his non-practicing father).  Hans received his bar mitzvah in the same week as the February Revolution. 

      In the civil war which followed the second [October] revolution, the tween-ager became a combatant on the White Russian side.  Even though Hans had experienced tsarist and White Russian anti-Semitism first hand, he fought on the tsarist side because he believed that all lawful authority was established by God, and obedience to authority was obedience to God.  When the royalists lost the civil war due to American intervention on the Communist side (Henry Ford et al), Hans escaped through Afghanistan into India, where he added English to his language repertoire.  [Hans was fluent in Polish, German, English, French, Greek and Yiddish.]  After being homeless and unemployed for three years, the teen-ager took on a job as an able seaman.  But he soon discovered that life on the water was not for him, and he abandoned ship at the first opportunity when in port at Halifax, Nova Scotia.  Taking brief jobs as a farmhand, or whatever he could get, he worked his way westwards across Canada.  In 1924, at the age of 18, he took on a civilian job caring for dogs in training for police K-9 duty, and started night school in Kingston, Ontario in order to obtain his high school diploma.  Upon graduation, he joined the Belleville, Ontario police department and was a cop for 37 years [except for 4 years in the air force during WWII, 13 months of that in a German  concentration camp after being shot down], retiring in 1963 on full pension at the age of 57.  He moved to Toronto and began his second career as a full-time poet, later becoming a founding member of the Kangaroo City Poets’ Collective.    He was about three decades senior to the average age of the poets in the collective, and was frequently consulted by the younger poets for advice on all aspects of life, as well as on questions of poetry.

        The Kangaroo City Poets’ Collective is a permanent organization, and when one of the member-poets passes on, his/her place is taken by someone elected from the membership of an auxiliary organization:  Kangaroo Poets – The Next Generation.  In this particular case, the Karol Hans Jewinski Chair is now occupied by Felll Wood.  Felll lives in Kokomo, Indiana.  She was introduced to Kangaroo City by Kangaroo Poet Rabin Duff, her high school English teacher in Peru, Indiana.  Through him, she was first published in South of Tuk in 2003.  Since 2007, she is the official custodian of the Karol Hans Jewinski Collection of the Kangaroo City Archives, and makes the selections in Hans’ name in the Nebiru Crossing bookstore, in keeping with the spirit and interests of Hans.

See also http://kangaroopoets.blogspot.ca/2011/04/hans-biographical-excerpt-from-nebiru.html