At the end of their refugee journey,
the long forced pilgrimage, burdened
with the smallest and heaviest bundles,
they settle at last, uneasily, anxiously,
in the wounded heart of a city or
its distant fringes beyond
the fashionable and complacent suburbs.
The small children learn
the unspoken rules of a double life:
Here, in the father’s domain,
the old ways are preserved, the chickens
slaughtered in the back yard, the mother
tongue enforced, though the children
are already beginning to speak it
with strange new accents
that grate on their parents’ ears.
(Cut off from its source, that mother tongue,
like an old crone alone in the forest,
will grow odder and quainter by the year,
which they will not note until one day,
many years later, they meet a traveler
from their native realm
and marvel at his strange speech.)
Outside the father’s door,
in the streets and schoolyards of the new world,
the immigrant children soon speak like locals
and are re-baptized
by their new friends with new names.
Henceforth, they will respond to two names
and will carry them both separately for
separate occasions.
In the homes of their new playmates
they see what they never see under their own roof —
perhaps animals treated like people (dogs
and cats at table) or possessions
treated with supreme indifference
by those who never had to turn their backs
and walk quickly away for ever
with only the suddenly precious
contents of their own pockets.
To be human, of course, is to adjust
to almost anything, and the children grow
into their double lives
gracefully and easily in the end.
After all, it may not be
that much more difficult
to cultivate two identities than one — and
in the end, therefore, even
a little easier to see through.