Tuesday Poem: previously published by Embers in 1987

To The Great Grandmothers

How did you take that first step

through the doorway of prosperity

into teeming gray Manhattan ?

From small villages,

and homely neighborhoods,

you voyaged to the gates of Babylon,

stepped outside of history, sailed away

from bustling Holland waterways

lined with leaning narrow houses,

turned your back on windmills

turning in slow motion,

Left the grit and bustle of Glasgow,

the smoky Staffordshire potteries,

lyric Dublin with its bicycles and pub signs,

windows full of curtain lace

reflecting narrow cobbled streets.

You made a clean break,

hearts beating a new cadence,

you marched into an adventure,

bearing talismans from home

full of prayers and promise.

And you were immortal saying goodbye –

like a bride made light by eagerness, and bravery,

ready to be swept across the threshold of mystery.

Then it must have been with sober feet

that you first planted yourselves

on United States firmament,

cast your lot in with all the rest,

tossed over in great waves,

as you were by the cold Atlantic.

And in the streets moving through

fields of faces, their patterns

intricate as Delft ware,

Royal Dalton, Limerick lace,

listening hard for a quiet space,

a familiar word in the din,

every inch of the air

and turf of the place

raucous with activity.

I wonder how your hearts

endured it: the dragon

and the labyrinth of New York,

whether poems or nightmares

danced inside your heads.

I picture your faces a little gray

from the shock of it all,

frozen, still as a photograph,

caught in a flash of insight:

in this enormous marketplace,

you would never be more than small change.