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.