Coming to America – a poem

Gravity-
gravity

brought my great-grandfather
to this country.

It was my great-grandmother’s
will, she who wrestled the moon

changing tides, disturbing orbits.
She brought him to America,

and yet he never left Germany
And became a suit in a chair.

A shadow against a wall.
When everyone was gone,

he’d walk, walk the Platte River,
past the smelters and the

Rendering plant. Past the
Meat packing plant, and railyard.

Remembering his walks in Germany,
Past the Oestricher Kran, on

the Rhine or Brentanohaus Garden:
thinking of Goethe.

At home he would smoke
cigar after cigar and exhale

great clouds of regret.
He never learned English,

refusing to speak at all. Sitting
In silence, his family a congregation

Of ghosts – living without him.
He’d sit for hours reading Zweig

Reding Stadler.
It was 1932 and he was at war

before the war to come.
At war with my great-grandmother

his cigar, always burning.
There would be no surrender,

not until 1939 that cold winter night,
when his last cigar went cold

and no one
noticed

he had died.
Victory at last!