Response to "Tilia cordata"

"Tilia cordata" is a complicated and touching poem. I like the way she lead the readers from her favorite tree to her life story. The opening is almost like a picture that she was sitting outside of her house, breathing the aroma of "linden". She said "I could spend its all too brief duration just sitting on my porch, breathing it in." (76) On the second page, she showed her obsession about that particular tree that she even wrote its names and usages in different parts of the world. Then, she jumped to her trip to Europe to find "art nouveau"(Jugendstil). In this section on page 77, I love the line says " a broken razor blade inside my mouth." because she compared her pain to an act of having a sharp metal piece in the most sensitive part of the body. Next, she talked about her fear of death during showers when she was young because her mom used to tell her the story of gas coming out of shower. Here, I doubted her dislike towards Germans and I was right after reading her comment about this poem.(169-170) After all those years, she still felt guilty of going to Germany and speaking German where the line says " ... and even uttering those sounds felt like treason." Later, on the way to Worms, she recalled Rashi, a scholar who had studied there in 11th century whom she learnt in her 4th grade Hebrew lessons. As she traveled around rural Germany, she bumped into her father's favorite park and she questioned herself why did he like it, why did a German park make her miss her father even though he was Jew. While reading this section, I looked back a scene from award-winning movie "The pianist" where the main character Szpilman was taking his girlfriend to a restaurant for a date but they couldn't go in because he was Jew, then she suggested him to go for a walk in a park but he told her Jews were not allowed in the park too. I can clearly see how wars and hate tear us apart brutally and I had no doubt that the author's family would have felt the same way at that time.