East New York, by Bushwick, just before Thanksgiving:
On Stewart Street
Today
Near where I lived
Where once the monastery of the orange bricks and open arches
Baptismal waters fell upon the brow, my father’s father,
The church was burned, the shrine was razed.
The convent, now, red-bricked to peephole apertures
Appears that it is under siege:
Hard by, the black and open windows
Flutter their few rags,
White flags of the surrender of some forgotten human destinies,
This afternoon touched by an orphan breeze.
A shingled shell of wood remains
Whose old and peaceful domesticities
Arose to heaven in flames:
O mystery! Of sweet sacrificed remembrances
O memory! Incinerated,
Gone, warm arms far off into the night.
These battle grounds – of all the empty lots
Await – some unseen face –
Or unseen force – of occupation;
From these reconoissances
I have come to know
This silent war,
And gone from home,
So many doors,
Now only open, welcome those without a home:
The wanderers.
So cold! – the fireplaces
Of these ransacked shelters
Now standing near, yet far beyond my reach
Their silent floors
Their hearthless rooms, once living,
Long awaiting one last season
Of, O, most unfriendly fires
Rising into immolation.
But the spectral sun gleams on the colored plaster
Pink and blue within the walls
Where now among the embers and the ashes
The flame of love once shone.
©1996-2010 Arthur Kirmss. All Rights Reserved.