My ma says
She pushed my stroller
around the bumpy streets of
Queens, Jamaica, Long Island,
even Manhattan,
Through rain and snow, all
alone.
Finding no help from the
passengers, all ignoring her
silent plea
She struggled to lift me,
And my clunky stroller onto
the bus,
As the doors began to close on
her, ready to shut her out.
Pushing past the passersby, a
destination in mind
In cold New York, I was a
weak replacement,
For a home lost to her past.
She listened to my babbles,
my nonsense, my gurgles and
My dreaded screeches in the
dead of the night.
She pleaded with me, saying,
“When will you respond to
my words?”
I responded.
But with a baby’s ignorance,
Simply staring with my
ignorant eyes.
Motherhood in New York,
For her, was lonelier than
expected.
Daddy Ji walks into our home,
cold and tired.
He walks into the basement,
rented from a Yugoslav.
A home under another home,
Two different tracks of life,
running parallel.
He’s seen a mirthless 11 years
of New York life,
11 years of American life
before that fateful year of ’97.
The year I came.
I reminded him what a home
was.
A life alone at 19, spent
walking the streets of New
York with no guide And a
dialogue of radio-English.
He was a cup already full of
tea.
Rockland College to NYIT, his
tuition he paid,
Every lonely penny.
The Stock Market surge of the
‘90s knocks on our door.
A penny becomes pennies.
Rich man Raheel, hustling
big numbers, with new doors
opening.
A life where every thread is
stretched taut with worries,
Has begun to loosen.
“Life is on its upswing.”
Daddy says to me, while I
roost in his lap,
“Ever since you came along.”
Yet the striking reality of
leaving a life behind, 12 hours
into the future,
Still strikes cold and hard at
every idle passing.
My mother is hunched over
the phone wire in our new
apartment,
Shouting at the phone,
through the phone,
to her mother, lamenting and
rejoicing.
Trying to share her new
family, her new home,
Through a piece of plastic and
cold science.
It gets lost somewhere in the
fray.
Lonesome and homeless,
They lived in a home they
could not call their own.
They drank their woe with
sugar,
And swallowed their pride
with old toast.
That’s all they could afford.
They were given no
guidebook, no explanation on
how to build a home.
But slowly, each hardship
procured the next step.
Each bite, each dollar, each
smile had to be earned.
The foundation had to be built
up with sorrows, loneliness,
and pain.
The walls had to be struck up
with confusion, humiliation
and failure.
The roof had to be patched up
with anger, sleepless nights
and the haunting static of
dial-up