DIASPORA

The shop in Havana is dust
and the Irish cotton is dust
and my father, a dusty Jew,
day after day comes home with a loaf of bread beneath his arm.
Day after day, each day alike,
his eyes oblique as striped cashmere,
not like the restless eyes of a captain searching the shallows
he returns to the house, a rough and bubbling crater.
Papa arrives: we eat lunch, our eyes fixed on the ceiling’s
     ornate moulding,
I have never seen the water come in, have seen neither
     fish nor flowerpot.
My mother enters and polishes the furniture’s
     heavy carving, changes Thursday’s sheets,
no flower ever to be seen in any bedroom.
All of the shops in Havana have closed,
the workers, in a noisy fever, file through the streets,
and my father, a dusty Jew,
bears once more the Ark of the Law
when he leaves Cuba..