The Terrible Man on the Plane and Other Poems About My Mother, by E. Laura Golberg

Poetry,  prose, chapbook, 36 pages, from Bottlecap Features.

The Terrible Man on the Plane paints a portrait of my mother, Dr. Bea Klempman. It starts with the story of how she came to study medicine in England during World War II, and her passage, by ship, in late 1943, back to South Africa.This is followed by poems about her marriage and her time in England after the War.

My family moved to America in 1967 and my mother, age 51, had to pass medical exams in order to practice. She did so and became the Director of the Albany, N.Y. VD Clinic. My mother, so conservative as she was in her attitude to sex, was totally nonjudgmental with her patients.

As I reached my late seventies, I wrote two of the final poems. Old age has made me more sympathetic about some of my mother’s decisions that had troubled me when I was younger.

The final poem is a reminder of how charming my mother could be.

E. Laura Golberg emigrated to America from England in 1969. She has lived in Washington, D.C. for the past fifty years where she married her American husband. Her poems have been nominated for both Pushcart and Best of the Net Prizes. Her work has appeared in Barrow Street, Rattle, Poet Lore, Laurel Review, Birmingham Poetry Review, RHINO, and the Journal of Humanistic Mathematics, among many other places. Laura won first place in the Washington, DC Commission on the Arts Larry Neal Poetry Competition.