Two Poems, Reverse
History, a Century Apart–Art Gatti c.2009
Midnight Fruit &
Vegetables/poem #1
It must be for lack of
a truck.
Why else sit crouched
low
in the untraveled dark
of the sidewalk
on this side of
Seventh Avenue South,
a minute before
midnight?
A pushcart brimming
with colorful produce by day,
now an ominous cameo
of black shapes without the sun.
Who would tend this
invisible store?
Why is it not tucked
away somewhere?
Pushcarts of old had
places to go–
nearby garages that
were once stables
for the nags that
pulled humble merchant wagons--
before it was cheaper
to just push them.
Not like this man’s
green world with the lights out
and no home for
pushcart or pusher.
A truck is probably a
borough away
and not working,
or stolen, or gone.
You need a truck if
you want to go home.
But this meager business
can only afford one
drop-off, one pickup a week–
why he sits there, this
unknown being,
huddled against the
loneliness
and the dark,
and the unsympathetic
shadows
that pass him in the
night.
Now and then
someone buys a banana
or two;
but it’s mostly just
those shadows passing him,
going home to soft
shadow beds.
-------------------------------------------------------
Midnight Fruit and
Vegetables/poem#2
When I first visited
my father’s hometown in Lazio, Italy,
way up near the flowing
green Abruzzi mountains,
the family there told
me to ask him,
when I returned to
America,
"Did you eat the
melon?"
It could be that, at
nine, he was eager to blow town--
accompany his mom
to search for the dad
that never sent for them,
as immigrants were
supposed to.
No.
Instead, it was a
convenient escape....
"Did you eat the
melon?"
How could he ever live
it down if he had stayed?
A simple mistake–
one that any rowdy kid
might make in the dark.
He was one of a gang of
little boys
prowling the sleepy mountain town night,
while Mama slept
and Papa was four thousand miles away.
and Papa was four thousand miles away.
At eight years old,
it’s all about the dare.
That night it was the
weekend marketers
who were targeted for their illicit fun and
sweet profit.
Weary farmers, asleep
by their wagons
in the small, empty
piazza,
guarding the humble
treasures of
their mountainside
harvests
from urchins just like
my father.
And so it was that the
plot
aimed their tiny hands
at the wagon of the melon man...
(Ask him, "Did
you eat the melon?")
And each did their
dirty deed
like bad little boys,
snatching a melon as
the man slept....
My dad’s turn
–and in the moonlight,
did he not see the biggest prize?
Did he not imagine the
muffled cheers to greet him upon
returning to the
thieves lair with this grand trophy?
And it would have been
so,
had it not been the
farmer’s bald head that he snatched
–or tried to–
followed by the angry
wails, and the
horrified,
fleeing feet of my
father.
"Ask him, ‘Did you eat the melon?’"
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