My Father and the Fig Tree

by Naomi Shihab Nye

For other fruits, my father was indifferent.

He'd point at the cherry trees and say,

"See those? I wish they were figs."

In the evening he sat by my beds

weaving folktales like vivid little scarves.

They always involved a figtree.

Even when it didn't fit, he'd stick it in.

Once Joha1 was walking down the road and he saw a fig tree.

Or, he tied his camel to a fig tree and went to sleep.

Or, later when they caught and arrested him, his pockets were full of figs.

At age six I ate a dried fig and shrugged.

"That's not what I'm talking about! he said,

"I'm talking about a fig straight from the earth — gift of Allah! — on a branch so heavy it

touches the ground.

I'm talking about picking the largest, fattest,

sweetest fig

in the world and putting it in my mouth."

(Here he'd stop and close his eyes.)

Years passed, we lived in many houses,

none had figtrees.

We had lima beans, zucchini, parsley, beets.

"Plant one!" my mother said.

but my father never did.

He tended garden half-heartedly, forgot to water,

let the okra get too big.

"What a dreamer he is. Look how many things he starts and doesn't finish."

The last time he moved, I got a phone call,

My father, in Arabic, chanting a song

I'd never heard. "What's that?"

He took me out back to the new yard.

There, in the middle of Dallas, Texas,

a tree with the largest, fattest,

sweetest fig in the world.

"It's a fig tree song!" he said,

plucking his fruits like ripe tokens,

emblems, assurance

of a world that was always his own.

1A trickster figure in Palestinian folktales

Claude McKay (1889-1948)

The Tropics in New York

Bananas ripe and green, and ginger-root,

Cocoa in pods and alligator pears,

And tangerines and mangoes and grape fruit,

Fit for the highest prize at parish fairs,

Set in the window, bringing memories

Of fruit-trees laden by low-singing rills,

And dewy dawns, and mystical blue skies

In benediction over nun-like hills.

My eyes grew dim, and I could no more gaze;

A wave of longing through my body swept,

And, hungry for the old, familiar ways,

I turned aside and bowed my head and wept.

A Hymn to Childhood

by Li-Young Lee

Childhood? Which childhood? The one that didn’t last? The one in which you learned to be afraid of the boarded-up well in the backyard and the ladder in the attic?

The one presided over by armed men in ill-fitting uniforms strolling the streets and alleys, while loudspeakers declared a new era, and the house around you grew bigger, the rooms farther apart, with more and more people missing?

The photographs whispered to each other from their frames in the hallway. The cooking pots said your name each time you walked past the kitchen.

And you pretended to be dead with your sister in games of rescue and abandonment. You learned to lie still so long the world seemed a play you viewed from the

muffled safety of a wing. Look! In run the servants screaming, the soldiers shouting, turning over the furniture, smashing your mother’s china.

Don’t fall asleep. Each act opens with your mother

reading a letter that makes her weep. Each act closes with your father fallen into the hands of Pharaoh.

Which childhood? The one that never ends? O

you, still a child, and slow to grow. Still talking to God and thinking the snow falling is the sound of God listening, and winter is the high-ceilinged house where God measures with one eye an ocean wave in octaves and minutes, and counts on many fingers all the ways a child learns to say Me.

Which childhood? The one from which you’ll never escape? You, so slow to know what you know and don’t know. Still thinking you hear low song in the wind in the eaves, story in your breathing, grief in the heard dove at evening, and plentitude in the unseen bird tolling at morning. Still slow to tell memory from imagination, heaven from here and now, hell from here and now, death from childhood, and both of them from dreaming.

Ellis Island

by Joseph Bruchac

Beyond the red brick of Ellis Island

where the two Slovak children

who became my grandparents

waited the long days of quarantine,

after leaving the sickness,

the old Empires of Europe,

a Circle Line ship slips easily

on its way to the island

of the tall woman, green

as dreams of forests and meadows

waiting for those who’d worked

a thousand years

yet never owned their own.

Like millions of others,

I too come to this island,

nine decades the answerer

of dreams.

Yet only part of my blood loves that memory.

Another voice speaks

of native lands

within this nation.

Lands invaded

when the earth became owned.

Lands of those who followed

the changing Moon,

knowledge of the seasons

in their veins.

Europe and America by David Ignatow

My father brought the emigrant bundle

of desperation and worn threads,

that in anxiety as he stumbles

tumble out distractedly;

while I am bedded upon soft green money

that grows like grass.

Thus, between my father

who lives on a bed of anguish for his daily bread,

and I who tear money at leisure by the roots,

where I lie in sun or shade,

a vast continent of breezes, storms to him,

shadows, darkness to him, small lakes, rough channels

to him, and hills, mountains to him, lie between us.

My father comes of a small hell

where bread and man have been kneaded and baked together.

You have heard the scream as the knife fell;

while I have slept

as guns pounded offshore. David Ignatow was born in Brooklyn, New York, in 1914. His early jobs included working in a family butcher shop and a bindery. He is a journalist, editor, and poet, and a lecturer at Kentucky and Kansas universities.

Chinese Hot Pot

by Wing Tek Lum

My dream of America Is like da bin louh* with people of all persuasions and tastes sitting down around a common pot chopsticks and basket scoops here and there some cooking squid and others beef some tofu or watercress all in one broth like a stew that really isn’t as each one chooses what he wishes to eat only that the pot and fire are shared along with the good company and the sweet soup spooned out at the end of the meal.

*Vietnamese word for Chinese hot pot, a broiling pot of broth in which people cook meat, fish, poultry, and vegetables.

Gary Soto 1981

Mexicans Begin Jogging

At the factory I worked

In the fleck of rubber, under the press

Of an oven yellow with flame,

Until the border patrol opened

Their vans and my boss waved for us to run. 5

"Over the fence, Soto," he shouted,

And I shouted that I was an American.

"No time for lies," he said, and passes

A dollar in my palm, hurrying me

Through the back door. 10

Since I was on his time, I ran

And became the wag to a short tail of Mexicans--

Ran past the amazed crowds that lined

The street and blurred like photographs, in rain.

I ran from that industrial road to the soft 15

Houses where people paled at the turn of an autumn sky.

What could I do but yell vivas

To baseball, milkshakes, and those sociologists

Who would clock me

As I jog into the next century

On the power of a great, silly grin. 20

Señora X No More

Straight as a nun I sit. My fingers foolish before paper and pen hide in my palms. I hear the slow, accented echo How are yu? I ahm fine. How are yu? of the other women who clutch notebooks and blush at their stiff lips resting sounds that float graceful as bubbles from their children's mouths. My teacher bends over me, gently squeezes my shoulders, the squeeze I give my sons, hands louder than words. She slides her arms around me: a warm shawl, lifts my left arm onto the cold, lined paper. "Señora, don't let it slip away," she says and opens the ugly, soap-wrinkled fingers of my right hand with a pen like I pry open the lips of a stubborn grandchild. My hand cramps around the thin hardness. "Let it breathe," says this woman who knows my hand and tongue knot, but she guides and I dig the tip of my pen into that white. I carve my crooked name, and again at night until my hand and arm are sore, I carve my crooked name, my name.

Pat Mora

Pat Mora: “La Migra”

I

Let's play La Migra

I'll be the Border Patrol.

You be the Mexican maid.

I get the badge and sunglasses.

You can hide and run,

but you can't get away

because I have a jeep.

I can take you wherever

I want, but don't ask

questions because

I don't speak Spanish.

I can touch you wherever

I want but don't complain

too much because I've got

boots and kick—if I have to,

and I have handcuffs.

Oh, and a gun.

Get ready, get set, run.

II

Let's play La Migra

You be the Border Patrol.

I'll be the Mexican woman.

Your jeep has a flat,

and you have been spotted

by the sun.

All you have is heavy: hat

glasses, badge, shoes, gun.

I know this desert,

where to rest,

where to drink.

Oh, I am not alone.

You hear us singing

and laughing with the wind,

Agua dulce brota aquí

aquí, aquí,* but since you

can't speak Spanish.

you do not understand

Get ready.

*Sweet water springs here, here, here.

Legal Alien

Pat Mora

Bi-lingual, Bi-cultural,

able to slip from "How's life?"

to "Me'stan volviendo loca,"

able to sit in a paneled office

drafting memos in smooth English,

able to order in fluent Spanish

at a Mexican restaurant,

American but hyphenated,

viewed by Anglos as perhaps exotic,

perhaps inferior, definitely different,

viewed by Mexicans as alien,

(their eyes say, "You may speak

Spanish but you're not like me")

an American to Mexicans

a Mexican to Americans

a handy token

sliding back and forth

between the fringes of both worlds

by smiling

by masking the discomfort

of being pre-judged

Bi-laterally.

"

Immigrant Picnic

Gregory Djanikian’s collections include So I Will Till the Ground (2007), Years Later (2000), Falling

Deeply into

By Gregory Djanikian

It's the Fourth of July, the flags are painting the town, the plastic forks and knives are laid out like a parade.

And I'm grilling, I've got my apron, I've got potato salad, macaroni, relish, I've got a hat shaped like the state of Pennsylvania.

I ask my father what's his pleasure and he says, "Hot dog, medium rare," and then, "Hamburger, sure, what's the big difference," as if he's really asking.

I put on hamburgers and hot dogs, slice up the sour pickles and Bermudas, uncap the condiments. The paper napkins are fluttering away like lost messages.

"You're running around," my mother says, "like a chicken with its head loose."

"Ma," I say, "you mean cut off, loose and cut off being as far apart as, say, son and daughter."

She gives me a quizzical look as though I've been caught in some impropriety. "I love you and your sister just the same," she

says, "Sure," my grandmother pipes in,

"you're both our children, so why worry?"

That's not the point I begin telling them, and I'm comparing words to fish now, like the ones in the sea at Port Said, or like birds among the date palms by the Nile, unrepentantly elusive, wild.

"Sonia," my father says to my mother, "what the hell is he talking about?" "He's on a ball," my mother says.

"That's roll!" I say, throwing up my hands, "as in hot dog, hamburger, dinner roll...."

"And what about roll out the barrels?" my mother

asks, and my father claps his hands, "Why sure," he

says, "let's have some fun," and launches into a polka, twirling my mother around and around like the happiest top,

and my uncle is shaking his head, saying "You could grow nuts listening to us,"

and I'm thinking of pistachios in the Sinai burgeoning without end, pecans in the South, the jumbled flavor of them suddenly in my mouth, wordless, confusing, crowding out everything else.

The Phone Booth at the Corner

Juan Delgado

Grandfather took a walk down to the neighborhood bar. That day mother had placed me under his care— at sixty he was visiting us for the first time. We stopped near a phone booth. Outside the bar in a cage a parrot whistled back at us. The phone began to ring. Grandfather pushed the door, forgetting he only spoke Spanish. He raised the phone to his ear: there was nothing he could do. Again, he pushed the door.

He didn’t understand it was divided by hinges and would only open by pulling in. He pushed even harder—I could see the fear in his face grow with his effort. We were both unable to speak as we pushed for what seemed minutes. He finally stopped—exhausted and the door opened. He stepped out laughing. I began to laugh with him and the bird whistled. All three of us broke the air with our voices.

Immigrants

by Pat Mora

wrap their babies in the American flag,

feed them mashed hot dogs and apple pie,

name them Bill and Daisy,

buy them blonde dolls that blink blue

eyes or a football and tiny cleats

before the baby can even walk,

speak to them in thick English,

hallo, babee, hallo,

whisper in Spanish or Polish

when the babies sleep, whisper

in a dark parent bed, that dark

parent fear, Will they like

our boy, our girl, our fine American

boy, our fine American girl?

Defining the Grateful Gesture Yvonne Sapia

(b. 1946)

According to our mother, when she was a child what was placed before her for dinner was not a feast, but she would eat it to gain back the strength taken from her by long hot days of working in her mother’s house and helping her father make candy in the family kitchen. No idle passenger traveling through life was she. And that’s why she resolved to tell stories about the appreciation for satisfied hunger. When we would sit down for our evening meal of arroz con pollo or frijoles negros con platanos she would expect us to be reverent to the sources of our undeserved nourishment, and to strike a thankful pose before each lift of the fork or swirl of the spoon.

For the dishes she prepared we were ungrateful, she would say, and repeat her archetypal tale about the Perez brothers from her girlhood town of Ponce, who looked like ripe mangoes, their cheeks rosed despite poverty. My mother would then tell us about the day she saw Mrs. Perez searching the neighborhood garbage, picking out with a missionary’s care the edible potato peels, the plantain skins the shafts of old celery to take home to her muchachos who required more food than she could afford. Although my brothers and I never quite mastered the ritual of obedience our mother craved, and as supplicants failed to feed her with our worthiness, we’d sit like solemn loaves of bread, sighing over the white plates with a sense of realization, or relief, guilty about possessing appetite.

Refugee Ship

like wet cornstarch

I slide past mi abuelita’s eyes

bible placed by her side

she removes her glasses

the pudding thickens

mama raised me with no language

I am an orphan to my Spanish name

the words are foreign, stumbling on my tongue

I stare at my reflection in the mirror

brown skin, black hair

I feel I am a captive

aboard the refugee ship

a ship that will never dock

a ship that will never dock

~Lorna Dee Cervantes

Tires Stacked in the Hallways of Civilization Chelsea, Massachusetts by Martin Espada "Yes, Your Honor, there are rodents," said the landlord to the judge, "but I let the tenant have a cat. Besides, he stacks his tires in the hallway."

The tenant confessed in stuttering English: "Yes, Your Honor, I am from El Salvador, and I put my tires in the hallway." The judge puffed up his robes like a black bird shaking off rain: "Tires out of the hallway! You don't live in a jungle

anymore. This is a civilized country." So the defendant was ordered to remove his tires from the hallways of civilization, and allowed to keep the cat.