An Immigrant's Life
The forked leaves of a silver maple
were once as a foreign
as Yiddish or junks on the Yangtse-Kiang.
And now I live in tandem
with their cycles.
I've moved in with crabapple
and American plum,
the screech of blue jays
and the cardinal's
wait wait wait cheer cheer cheer.
I married an American.
And bedded down with strange new landscape.
In May,
pink blossoms flood the lawn.
In January,
the grass is frosted white.
I surrendered so much of course:
ghost-like eucalypts, brash lantana,
rainbow lorikeets, the mad laugh of the kookaburra.
And I've given up friends
but this isn't about people.
An old permanence has been replaced
by a new perpetuity.
Trees change color -
from lush to pastel piquant -
and then they shed.
I learned that nothing was dead,
only resting in its own necessary darkness.
And the old country in me loosened.
The new one took me in.
Author: John Grey
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