Roughly translated from German:

Music is love.

     It can laugh with me.
     It can cry with me.
     It can bring together what was once separated.

Music can tell me what lips are afraid to say.

Music can bring back what I lost.

Music alone therefore is chosen.

Margarete Kernbach is my grandmother on my mother’s side. I found this parchment with her words following my mother’s death in 2012. It was among the things she left behind, very simply preserved in a plastic frame. I never knew my Oma wrote poetry. Nor do I know if this was the only poem or if there were ever any other writings by her. I only know of this one.

Discovering this little poem ties me to my grandmother in a profound way, at least for me it does. Not that I realized it at that moment though. I…