BROOKLYN AND AMERICA IN THE SAME BREATH

By Frank Polizzi

I

I was eating in a neighborhood restaurant
called al di la – on the other side
from the international city of chic,
while sitting on a wooden pew
from some lost Protestant church,
a condominium now.
I looked out the plate glass
to the two-storied street,
a typical block in Brooklyn,
a former city where
myriad ethnic and racial groups gathered.
we were all terrone in the eyes
of the natavists who overlorded the masses of Ellis,
spreading bodies over the states,
the rest jammed here into enclaves we sweated from,
breathing heavily and gasping.
we existed for those who came before,
struggling to realize new dreams for our children.

II

When the migration started to the suburbs
and whereabouts as far as California,
Brooklyn became buried in the rubble of discontent,
so much so we swore no one cared for this place.
I dreamt of railroad houses of bricks without mortar –
crumbling, the debris settled into dust,
the ashen inhabitants despaired
and I jumped from the bed.

III

By chance I discovered an old flint in a lot
and when I think back now,
maybe it caused the original spark
for the urban homesteaders moving in
and the foreign refugees following.
Brooklyn began to ignite
from the hiphop/jazz/film black neighborhood of Fort Greene
to the thriving Chinese markets and restaurants on 8th Avenue
and the out-to-the-street Mexican Sunday Mass of Sunset Park,
to la foccaceria/pasticceria in Sicilian/Calabrian Bensonhurst,
to the Sephardic Jews of Ocean Parkway
and their cousins, the Orthodox of Borough Park,
where Manhattan tourists go for the best deals,
to the Russian café scene of Brighton
and to the Islamic shops of Bay Ridge,
where there are women, wearing the hijab, weaving thru the crowd –
a neighborhood of Greeks and Turks, Pakistanis and Indians,
Jews and Arabs, Irish Catholics and Irish Protestants,
in one place, micro-replicas of other lands yet different in texture.

The waiter brought over an espresso
and we chatted about the Smith Street scene in Carroll Gardens
where I grew up - we called it South Brooklyn back then,
now an “in place” luring other Manhattan-turned Brooklyn restaurants,
where gypsies once read fortunes –
my childish palm outstretched, revealing buona fortuna
if I remained on this island
as I laughed out the door.
even then I knew we were never really accepted
with our faces olive from the heat of the Coney Island sun.
Eye-talians/guineas/wops/dagos and now terrone in leganord.it.

IV

We must rise with everyone who wants to return
to this island of the world,
and if the expatriates doubt renewal,
their dreams will ricochet in the night,
moving back and fleeing and moving back again –
a nightmare of trekking in storms of five feet mounds of snow,
hearing the EL sounds vibrating, clanging, shrieking
in the land they drifted from –
suburb to suburb and state to state –
a wanderer who lost the feel of Brooklyn soil
and failed to bring a chip of bluestone in remembrance.
in his strange new world where everyone thinks you’re foreign
because you’re ethnic, because you’re from Brooklyn,
dat funny place where life began for millions of Americans,
that tip of the continent absorbing the tears of the world
and washing them away into the waves beating its coast.

V

This borough has risen again,
after being buried for decades,
bursting thru the earth and scattering the ashes,
as sure as the seventeen year cicada sheds its shell.
my eyes moved from the window to my empty plate.
and I thought of my home at the mouth of the deep harbor.
that Brooklyn was never connected to the mainland
must be amusing to others in the marrow of the USA,
but we are no less American than those citizens
who struggle to navigate their once-rooted history.
this winged force will reach the heartland
and help them rise above their pure, undiluted whiteness.
This spirit may coax them to spend a day in Brooklyn
for the sheer excitement of it, as if they too could fly
over neighborhoods, spying an exotic and modern world –
Brooklyn and America in the same breath.