How this world has changed

How the world has changed

From the land, my family came to.

My great grandparents came here from Europe

To Ellis Island, they came. 

It didn't matter if they were Irish or Italian.

They came here waving American flags from where they came.

They didn't speak good English but they learned.

My grandfather grew up in Canarsie and learned English.

His mother told him, she was Italian, but now she was American.

He was American so he should speak English outside the house.

He left his home with the American flag on the porch to go to school.

He went to school with all the other boys and girls who came from Ellis Island

or the children of those fresh off the boat. 

How the world has changed.

How the world has changed from the world that he knew. 

His mother working a few blocks down as a seamstress

with all the other Italian girls and Jewish girls.

His father working down at Fulton with the other merchants.

One of the said merchants, the father of my grandmother.

That sweet girl my grandfather knew from next door.

Those children growing up on that same block in Canarsie

Oh, how this world has changed.

How the world has changed from that block on Canarsie,

my mother and her siblings were raised. 

Just a few blocks down from that block my grandparents grew up on 

That block where my mother walked down a few blocks to the local Catholic school

She woke up and made her bed and came home to do her homework and

eat her mother's cooking.

But before her mother came and told her dinner was ready she played with her schoolmates.

Playing hopscotch and stoopball

My father and his friends growing up in 'Ol Miss Basin

playing manhunt and riding their bikes in the streets

Playing outside til dusk

My father wasn't even in the house most of his childhood.

He would play in the street, and those days he didn't feel like running around

He would take the money he saved up from his paper route to spend all Saturday at the arcade

If he had some money saved up he would go to one of the good delis for a sandwich 

or a Bakery like Palermo or Moretti's for fresh bread and pastries.

How the world has changed. 

I sit on the porch of the same house my mother was raised in, in Canarsie. 

Her family came to Canarsie from Italy and her branch never left.

My father would take me and my brother for a drive and we'd ride past his old neighborhood.

My parents telling me stories of these same streets they walked in their youth.

I ask if its still the same but all they say is No.

Many of the old shops my mother went to are gone.

The streets of Brooklyn my father ran around in, in his youth

now filled with speeding machines

I can barely play baseball with my brother in the driveway

knowing if he hit's anything, we will need to wait a few minutes, for no cars to be coming.

That same elementary school my grandmother attended,

I attended.

The portraits of her graduating class long since taken down.

But I'm certain mind was never hung up.

When she went she went 'til 8th grade

students were held accountable for everything

a corpral punishment was allowed

and the young ladies had to sew their own graduation gowns in home ec class

They had home ec class as well, which was another point I liked to point out.

No such things I remembered from my time in that school.

How the world has changed.

I look out my bedroom window into the backyard.

Envisioning the land my mother described.

Where my grandfather had a grapevine

and they had a pool to swim in in the summer,

playing volleyball with the neighbor girls from their pool tossing the ball over the fence.

A rose tree, blooming with dozens of roses every spring.

But now that yard of half dead grass and stones covering dirt

The only similarity my mother sees is that rose tree in the corner of the yard

Not nearly as healthy and vibrant as it once was.

How the world has changed 

A few years ago my grandmother and grandfather came to visit.

My grandfather, a silent man of 84 or so sat on the steps of that Canarsie house.

He sat on those concrete steps holding an orange, a paper towel and a paring knife.

I was talking to my grandmother about my old school that was also her old school.

I look at my grandfather on that spring morning as he gazed down the streets he use to roam

And in his eyes I see him searching for those streets that he once knew.  

 

This poem is about: 
Me
My family
My community

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