IMMIGRANTS
By Ruth Daigon

Let us go slowly
Let us taste every moment
Let us look long
and see what we have never seen before
the ocean with a thousand eyes
singing in the shell of time.

When we arrive
empty as a glass ready to be filled,
naked as a stone to be warmed by the sun,
let us speak simple to one another
with the sound of our parents.

Let us listen to their stories
and marvel at the stubbornness of space
for the shtetl is everywhere
and our time is all time.

We are children of silence and slow speech
spinning one thread to another
weaving strands of time
lifting dropped stitches to repair the hours.

Let us soak up the sounds of our new country.
Let us fall headlong in love with America, wildly, willfully
and stretch out over the streets of New York
with all of us guaranteed heaven
and the warm promise of earth.

We want young men looking at us with bad intentions.
We want love as hot as the sun on the back of a black cat
We want love, uncontrollable as waters spilling their banks
We want to live in a zone where a root burrows its deep desire.

We'll strike flint and start life
all over again
but wear next to our skin
a necklace of the past locked in amber,
memories polished clean by time.

Excerpted from Payday at the Triangle. See our Behind The Scenes article this issue with Ruth!!! Payday at the Triangle by Ruth Daigon, ISBN:1-891298-10-0, Small Poetry Press, Select Poets Series.