Today’s poet Anne Boileau portrays a starry mid-Atlantic portal of searing significance, taking us back 80 years in time. And today is Day 754 of the Daily Poems.
Gateway to the USA
– mid-Atlantic
It’s a new story.
I shall tell it in English.
Visas. Papi got us visas! But only for us four.
We didn’t ask him how, but we do know why.
3.00 am, our third day out.
Can’t sleep, can’t breathe. Sweat. Fear.
The engine’s rumbling throb below.
I leave the cabin, creep
along the corridor, clutching my shoes,
climb three flights of stairs.
Out onto the deck.
Ah! Sweet fresh air!
It is the ocean, but silver, smooth as glass,
an infinite mirror answering the brightest stars
I’ve ever seen, the brightest, fullest moon
I’ve ever seen, casting a silver path
that ends on the horizon
and slides along beside our ship.
Every star is winking at its double.
Doldrums in the middle of the Atlantic.
If this were a sailing ship we would be becalmed.
We are hanging suspended
between two lives, two continents,
leaving behind our mother tongue,
Opa, Oma, the five aunts.
They had to take a train to somewhere else.
I’m gazing at the glassy sea, the starry sky,
when suddenly the surface breaks –
a shoal of nine steel torpedoes,
fins quivering like wings,
are shooting along beside our ship –
flying flying flying! Out of their element
yet full of joy, of hope.
Then, as if on command, they vanish.
No splash. No shattered glass.
Mutti unstitched our stars, threw them overboard.
Stars are not required in New York.
Anne Boileau