By Eamonn Wall,
To mark my father’s first day in America
a young couple mounted a super-sized
Sony boombox atop a garbage can
at a bus stop: Dyckman St. & Broadway.
For his enjoyment, they played loud
merengue and danced blithe steps
along the sidewalk they had shaped
to the Dominican beat, and except
for an old dude in a grey mackintosh,
we cheered at entertainment’s end,
the bus halting with a cinch and roar.
Next day on a downtown A between
125th and Columbus Circle, a wildly-
dressed young lady called for attention:
she sang a canción regarding love,
trabajo, and old sad waves that personify
as they fall on distant shores, lyrics
forcing up from my father’s tender core
a sigh, a tear, a reckoning of many lost
lives, as he saw it, passed in harsh light,
far from hearth and home, his own uncle
disbanded patriot from our troubled times
found dead on an LA skid-row alley way.
My mother sat between us on the bounding
subway car: enthralling these magic
movements of American life. On the third day
we lunched to the rum-thum-thum
of African drums benched in the shade
of Central Park as we awaited with a crowd
a gay corps of Korean breakdancers to resume.