When I was asked to give this presentation, I knew I needed to think about my own work in a more objective and scholarly way. The first thing I realized is that my work springs from shame and silence, the shame I felt growing up as an Italian American, a shame so strong, so overwhelming that I spent the first twenty-five years of my life unable to speak. Of course, that is the ultimate hyperbole, but it is a hyperbole that best exemplifies the twin themes of shame and silence that have so influenced my writing.

Before I went to school, I spoke a southern Italian dialect inside my home, but as soon as I stepped outside the old brown doors, I was in America, and I soon learned that I had to speak English in school and on the streets. In school I was always terrified that the Italian word would come flying out of my mouth before I could prevent it from happening. I was intimidated by the teachers and I learned from them how to be silent, how to sit with my hands folded neatly on my desk, how to be a good girl. In truth, I was afraid to be anything else.

My poem, Public School # 18: Paterson, New Jersey, expresses my feelings of fear and shame. It also describes my search for words to express my sense of outsiderness and invisibility, and the feelings of courage and empowerment that came when I was able to find the words to express my anger.

Public School No.18, Paterson, New Jersey

Miss Wilson’s eyes, opaque

as blue glass, fix on me:

“We must speak English.

We’re in America now.”

I want to say, “I am American,”

but the evidence is stacked against me.

My mother scrubs my scalp raw, wraps

my shining hair in white rags

to make it curl.  Miss Wilson

drags me to the window, checks my hair

for lice.  My face wants to hide.

At home, my words smooth in my mouth,

I chatter and am proud.  In school,

I am silent, grope for the right English

words, fear the Italian word

will sprout from my mouth like a rose,

fear the progression of teachers

in their sprigged dresses,

their Anglo-Saxon faces.

Without words, they tell me

to be ashamed.

I am.

I deny that booted country

even from myself,

want to be still

and untouchable

as these women

who teach me to hate myself.

Years later, in a white

Kansas City house,

the Psychology professor tells me

I remind him of the Mafia leader

on the cover of Time magazine.

My anger spits

venomous from my mouth:

I am proud of my mother,

dressed all in black,

proud of my father

with his broken tongue,

proud of the laughter

and noise of our house.

Remember me, Ladies,

the silent one?

I have found my voice

and my rage will blow

your house down.

Another facet of my shame and silence came to me through the books we were given that were intended to teach us how to read. While I loved the “Dick and Jane” books that we read because they opened a door into a life totally different form my own, I also knew that I did not fit into the world of those bright primary colors, their perfect house, their perfect dog, their perfect doghouse, their perfect lawn, their perfect father, their perfect American faces, their big white colonial house.  I knew their world was so far removed from mine, it might just as well have been on Mars; yet it filled me with longing to be those people, to be blonde and cute and middle class. Those books told me that I was all wrong, and that I didn’t fit in to the world I wanted to inhabit. I think when I started to read those books and look at the pictures, I began my journey toward trying to erase what I was-- a working class Italian American. Of course, my family wasn’t even fully working class. Because of my father’s health, our position was always precarious; we were always hanging on to the edge economically, and my shame at my parents, their inability to speak English, to be anything but what they were, was a way of accepting a negation of myself, of accepting that I was not worthy of being validated.  It filled me with the desire to pretend to myself and everyone else that I was American and middle-class even against all evidence to the contrary.

I learned to pretend in school through the unintentional lessons teachers taught me. In fact, school taught me a great deal about identity and, in doing so, it shaped my self-image.  One of the most important lessons I learned was how to be silent as a way of hiding, of not calling attention to myself. My poem, “Learning Silence,” clearly illustrates the way I internalized that lesson.

Learning Silence

By the time I am in first grade, I know enough

to be frightened, to keep my hands folded

on my desk and try to be quiet “as a mouse.”

I am nervous most of the time,

feel sick to my stomach.

I am afraid to raise my hand, afraid

to ask for the bathroom pass, afraid

of the bigger children, but most of all,

afraid of Miss Barton who does not like me.

We read the DICK AND JANE books.  The world of these books,

painted in bright primary colors, seems so free and perfect.

When I open the pages, I feel I can walk through them,

like Alice stepping through the looking glass,

into that clean world,

those children with their wide open faces,

their blonde curls, their cute, skipping legs,

their black and white dog with its perky tail,

their big, white house with its huge lawn of manicured grass.

In those books, I can forget Miss Barton and her icy

eyes and the grimy, shopworn classrooms of PS 18,

with their scarred wooden desks,

their dark green blackout shades,

reminders of the war that has just ended.

In that house, where even the doghouse is perfect,

there would be no reason to be afraid.

I try to be good.  I try to be quiet.

I hope Miss Barton will not curl her lip

when she looks at me.

I would gladly turn into Jane

if some magic could transform me,

make me blonde and cute, instead of sad

and serious and scared, with my sausage curls

my huge, terrified eyes,

my long nose, my dark, olive-toned skin,

the harsh cheap cotton of my clothes.

While these experiences in school were painful, there was a more positive dimension to my school experiences. In school, I  learned to love poetry and the sound of the language through poems read aloud by my teachers who seemed to me to be immensely educated. I would have forgiven them anything to have them recite poems or to hear them read stories aloud. Of course, my mother told us stories, but she couldn’t read them to us since she couldn’t read English because my father believed that women didn’t need to go to school.   Though she cried and pleaded, he would not permit her to attend night school.  Her one big regret was that she never learned to read in English.  In light of this repression of her voice, I learned to see reading as a rebellious and a revolutionary act.

At first, however, I did not learn to speak in my own voice in my writing, but rather to imitate the established literary figures whose words captivated me.  Most of my attempts at poetry from the time I was very young until I was about 40 were very much in imitation of the poets I read in school.  I thought I was part of the English literary tradition, and I learned about craft from studying these poems. I wanted to be Keats or Shelley or Amy Lowell; it took me a long time to realize that this yearning was part of my attempt to erase myself.

I tried very hard to do just that. I had my mass of curly, wiry hair thinned constantly, trying to shape it into order; I even made up stories to tell my friends about my family and where we lived and I seldom invited anyone home. The truth is I could have called myself anything I wanted, I still looked dark and foreign, but I did everything I could to transform myself into a “real” American. I bought preppy clothes, plain wool skirts and soft lambskin sweaters, pastel-colored, oxford cloth shirts and crewneck sweaters. I bought make-up to lighten my skin, to erase the dark circles under my eyes, and eventually went to a plastic surgeon to have my big Italian nose altered to look smaller, less obtrusive, less foreign. Still, I could not stop being shy around anyone who was not Italian, could not make myself forget the high school English teacher who looked at me and said “Anyone who speaks another language at home and thinks in that language will score 100 points lower on the SAT tests than people who do not.” I constantly practiced speaking in English, practiced erasing those Italian words that filled my mind.

When I married I chose a man with blond hair and blue eyes, a handsome man who lived in a white colonial house in an upper-middle class town. His parents went to college and his father was an executive with a shipping company; he had an Irish last name. To me, these people, four generations removed form Ireland, were American. Marrying into that family, I thought I was being transformed, lifting up and away from my own Italian self.

My husband seemed to be everything I was not. In marrying him I could deny my past and forget my name with all its awkward, pointy z’s and t’s.  With my new name, I thought I could forget that my parents couldn’t speak English correctly and were poor.  In my poem, “Growing Up Italian”, I give voice to that period of self-denial and I also mark a turning point in my own life, the point at which I decided to take back my own name.

GROWING UP ITALIAN

When I was a little girl,

I thought everyone was Italian,

and that was good.  We visited

our aunts and uncles,

and they visited us.

The Italian language smooth

and sweet in my mouth.

In kindergarten, English words fell on me,

thick and sharp as hail.  I grew silent,

the Italian word balanced on the edge

of my tongue and the English word, lost

during the first moment

of every question.

It did not take me long to learn

that olive‑skinned people were greasy

and dirty.  Poor children were even dirtier.

To be olive‑skinned and poor was to be dirtiest of all.

Almost every day

Mr. Landgraf called Joey

a "spaghetti bender:"

I knew that was bad.

I tried to hide

by folding my hands neatly

on my desk and

being a good girl.

Judy, one of the girls in my class,

had honey‑blonde hair and blue eyes.

All the boys liked her.  Her parents and

grandparents were born in America.

They owned a local tavern.

When Judy's mother went downtown

she brought back coloring books and candy.

When my mother went downtown, she brought back

one small brown bag with a towel or a sheet in it.

The first day I wore my sister's hand‑me‑down coat,

Isabelle said "That coat looks familiar.  Don't

I recognize that coat?" I looked at the ground.

When the other children brought presents

for the teacher at Christmas, embroidered silk

handkerchiefs and "Evening in Paris"  perfume,

I brought dishcloths made into a doll.

I read all the magazines that told me

why blondes have more fun,

described girls whose favorite color was blue.

I hoped for a miracle that would turn my dark skin light,

that would make me pale and blonde and beautiful.

So I looked for a man

with blond hair and blue eyes

who would blend right in,

and who'd give me blond, blue‑eyed children

who would blend right in

and a name that could blend right in

and I would be melted down

to a shape and a color

that would blend right in,

till one day, I guess I was 40 by then,

I woke up cursing

all those who taught me

to hate my dark, foreign self,

and I said, "Here I am ‑

with my olive‑toned skin

and my Italian parents,

and my old poverty,

real as a scar on my forehead,"

and all the toys we couldn't buy

and all the words I didn't say,

all the downcast eyes

and folded hands

and remarks I didn't make

rise up in me and explode.

onto paper like firecrackers

like meteors

and I celebrate

my Italian American self,

rooted in this, my country, where

all those black/brown/red/yellow

olive‑skinned people

soon will raise their voices

and sing this new anthem:

Here I am

and I'm strong

and my skin is warm in the sun

and my dark hair shines,

and today, I take back my name

and wave it in their faces

In 1985, when  Helen Barolini’s The Dream Book: An Anthology of Writing by Italian-American Women came out, I saw my name Maria Mazziotti Gillan spelled out above my poem and saw it in a New York Times review where they quoted from it, I was, for the first time, incredibly proud of that name and all the lineage it embodied.  Then a man with whom I had gone to college called me up and asked me if I was the same Maria Mazziotti who went to Seton Hall University, and I said yes. In that moment the idea of taking back my maiden name surfaced. I used the name tentatively at first, fearing that people would be confused as I had been using my married name for so long; but with the encouragement of my publisher, Stanley Barkan of Cross-Cultural Communications, I started placing that name on everything that I published, including my third book, The Weather of Old Seasons. Later I wrote a chapbook published by Malafemmina Press called Taking Back My Name which placed together the poems I had written over the last twenty-five years about my ethnicity.  It included my poem “Betrayals” that was published first in 1972 but which was originally written in 1969 and worked on between 1969 and 1972. It also included new poems from 1990 and 1991 and many poems from the early 80s.

My consciousness of the necessity to take back my name, however, grew as I began to be ashamed of my own attempts to erase myself, to deny what I was, and to try to be “white.” Since my married name was Irish, I had only made a small step up the ladder to American-ness; I had thought myself more American when I had light-haired children who could pass as fully American.  In yearning for this ability to pass, I see that I am similar to people from many ethnic and racial groups where individuals yearn to take on the trappings of a “typical American” and to be received by others as such, to blend into the mainstream of a society where all differences would be magically erased.  Of course, in passing, in allowing the erasure, we risk losing ourselves. Nevertheless, I wanted so desperately to be accepted that I was willing to endure erasure. 

I felt desperate because I felt doubly cursed with dark skin and a poor family. After all, how “ethnic” one is considered usually has a lot to do with class.  Because my father was a janitor and not a lawyer, because we lived in the ghetto and not the suburbs, my outsiderness was doubly insured.  I did not have the “class training” to cover over the markers of my ethnicity. Of course, even with such training,  my frizzy hair and olive skin would have given me away.  Only gradually did I realize that no matter what my name, I still looked too Italian, too foreign, to pass.  I learned that it didn’t matter if I changed my name or not. I didn’t ever have the luxury of “passing” because other people always picked me out as foreign, as un-American.  “What are you?” people asked me, and when asked I always said “Italian;” Of course, when I went to Italy in June 1977, I discovered I was not Italian but American. Yet, back in the United States, I found I was not American either, but some hybrid creature, neither fully American nor fully Italian.  In recognizing this truth, I began to embrace what I had always denied, and I did so with a vengeance.  If you look like an Italian and sound like one and think like one, you are one, and no amount of pretending is going to change that.

At an early age, I knew that how others marked me was significant. I remember in grammar school two teachers standing in front of the room and saying “look at her.  She’s such a scared little rabbit.  I bet her father beats her!” At the time, I was just humiliated by their words. When I became a writer, I knew that I could use words to reshape the way others saw my family because I had the power to tell our side of the story.  I think my poem “Arturo” explains most clearly how we learned shame and silence.

                                        ARTURO

I told everyone

your name was Arthur,

tried to turn you

into the imaginary father

in the three‑piece suit

that I wanted instead of my own.

I changed my name to Marie,

hoping no one would notice

my face with its dark Italian eyes.

Arturo, I send you this message

from my younger self, that fool

who needed to deny

the words

(Wop!  Guinea!  Greaseball!)

slung like curved spears,

the anguish of sandwiches

made from spinach and oil;

the roasted peppers on homemade bread,

the rice pies of Easter.

Today, I watch you,

clean as a cherub,

your ruddy face shining,

closed by your growing deafness

in a world where my words

cannot touch you.

At 80, you still worship

Roosevelt and JFK,

read the newspaper carefully,

know with a quick shrewdness

the details of revolutions and dictators,

the cause and effect of all wars,

no matter how small.

Only your legs betray you

as you limp from pillar to pillar,

yet your convictions remain

as strong now as they were at 20.

For the children, you carry chocolates

wrapped in goldfoil

and find for them always

your crooked grin and a $5 bill.

I smile when I think of you.

Listen, America,

this is my father, Arturo,

and I am his daughter, Maria.

Do not call me Marie.

Marie was the name I adopted in my assimilationist phase. During this time my first book came out and the poems in it were mostly imitative of all the poets I read, though a professor in graduate school said to me, “It’s in this poem about your father that you find what you have to say.”  That professor gave me courage to write about my life. Maybe I’ll never be Keats, I thought, but I have to write about what I know. This choice has its consequences especially because some critics label narrative, personal poetry as “confessional” poetry and wrinkle up their noses at it.  I would not call my poems confessional, but I do try to convey the emotional truths of my life in my work. It is not always easy to do, though, because I still am that shy, inarticulate child on the inside.  When I stand up in front of an audience to read my poems, I feel very vulnerable.  The more I’ve written, however, the more I have moved toward simplicity and clarity.  I want there to be no separation between my poems and what I am.

This truth policy has not been easy on my family. My mother, like many Italians, didn’t want her secrets revealed.  She was horrified by my poems.  She wanted me to convey an idealized version of our lives, even lie about them, if possible. She really wanted me to write poems like the kind she memorized in Italy, the kind found on the backs of Mass Cards.  Like my mother, my son also was quite horrified by me and by my poetry.  As my poem, “My Son Tells Me Not to Wear My Poet’s Clothes” suggests, he is the product of my assimilationist period. He would like me to continue to try to blend inconspicuously into the background.

My Son Tells Me Not To Wear My Poet’s Clothes

My son tells me not to wear my poet’s clothes.  “They’re weird,” he says.  He wants me to look like an old-fashioned grandmother, someone out of an L. L. Bean catalog in a preppy sweater and a corduroy skirt, the kind of clothes that would have been all wrong for me even when I was 20 years old and 104 pounds.  I love thin flowery dresses that float around me when I walk, long colorful scarves with fringe on them.  My son does not say it out loud, but I know he thinks I’m the wrong kind of mother and that I should act my  age and give up my poetry because it is strange for me to be running off to all those poetry readings and giving workshops and working so many hours a week at my job.  Sometimes I think we should trade places.  He could be the staid, conservative mother and I the recalcitrant son.  When we talk on the phone, I hear how he shoulders the responsibilities of his life: wife, children, job, house, yard.  “John,” I say “You’re only 31.  Give yourself a break.”  I hear him sigh, that expelled breath fraught with meaning that is the sound I make when I am anxious or bored, and  I am saddened when I hear it coming from him over the wires across all that distance, not only the landscape that separates us but the language that fails us.  I cannot find a way to make him understand that I love him, this son who needs to be far away from me so that it’s as though I am chasing him down a path but he’s always faster than me.  I see him sitting with his son Jackson in his arms, Jackson who looks just like John did at two, and I see the way they lean together, Jackson so relaxed and trusting, his ear pressed to his father’s heart.

I never could have imagined as I was growing up Italian writing poems about shame that my own children would be ashamed of me.  My son always tells me I’m too loud, and I say, “Well, we worked to send you to those private schools so you could be soft-spoken.”

For myself, I stayed silent too long to be quiet now. Lately, I am trying to speak about the way death and illness have recently touched my life.  I have been profoundly affected by the deaths of my mother and father, nine years and one year ago, respectively. I feel, however, that they are still part of my life and my poetic voice as I suggest in the following poem.

Last Night My Mother Came Back 

Last night my mother came back.

I saw her in the distance, her body

draped in wisps of fog, ethereal

as she never was in life, my sturdy

mother, her feet always planted

on the ground, practical

and no-nonsense and scolding.

Why doesn’t she move toward me

instead of moving away?

My sister tells me my mother visited

her the night she ended up

in the hospital again.  In that room,

in that North Carolina hospital,

my mother, who never traveled,

who in her life had only been to Italy

and New Jersey, came to my sister

and my father came too.  My sister woke

up and they were there, sitting

in straight-backed chairs near

her bed. They tell my sister

to be careful, and then they talk

for a long time about her children

and the family and what she can do

to save herself. “It was so nice

to see them,” my sister says,

I am hurt that they do not visit me. 

When she was dying, my mother

said she couldn’t wait until I arrived

every day. My sister who has always

run away from things she could  not face,

had to be forced to visit, but I knew

my mother needed me. I had to be there

with her, that swollen belly,

the cancer turning her skin

as yellow as a legal pad, her small hand

soft in mine. Now I watch my mother

move away from me, see the white light

she said she saw when she was dying,

watch her turn one last time to look at me,

her smile almost a hand on my face,

her love, as always, delivered in gestures

rather than words. I mention her

every day, remembering

the things she said ,the way

she taught us to be women

who have the grace to find

the nugget of gold

hidden in the center

of  our ordinary days.

In examining this poem and my other work closely, I see that women are the central driving force of my books, that it is my connection to women that makes me strong and it is the strength that I pass on to my daughter.  I try to clarify these feelings in “I Dream of My Grand mother and Great-Grandmother."

I Dream Of My Grandmother And Great-Grandmother 

I imagine them walking down rocky paths

toward me, strong, Italian women returning

at dusk from fields where they worked all day

on farms built like steps up the sides

of steep mountains, graceful women carrying water

in terra cotta jugs on their heads.

What I know of these women, whom I never met,

I know from my mother, a few pictures

of my grandmother, standing at the doorway

of the fieldstone house in Santo Mauro,

the stories my mother told of them,

but I know them most of all from watching

my mother, her strong arms lifting sheets

out of the cold water in the wringer washer,

from the way she stepped back,

wiping her hands on her homemade floursack apron,

and admired her jars of canned peaches

that glowed like amber in the dim cellar light.

I see those women in my mother

as she worked, grinning and happy,

her garden spilling its bounty into her arms.

She gave away baskets of peppers,

lettuce, eggplant, bowls of pasta,

meatballs, zeppoli, loaves of homemade bread.

“It was a miracle,” she said.

“The more I gave away, the more I had to give.”

Now I see her in my daughter,

that same unending energy,

that quick mind,

that hand, open and extended to the world.

When I watch my daughter clean the kitchen counter,

watch her turn, laughing,

I remember my mother as she lay dying,

how she said of my daughter, “that Jennifer,

she’s all the treasure you’ll ever need.”

I turn now, as my daughter turns,

and see my mother walking toward us

down crooked mountain paths,

behind her, all those women

dressed in black.

In this poem as in many others, it is the men who are “distant.”  As Joe E.

Weil wrote in his review of Things My Mother Told Me in The Connecticut Poetry Review,

“The men are distant.  They come in and out of doors, sleep, eat, involve themselves in pursuits.  The poet loves her father, loves her son, but feels a constant separateness in their presence, a love far more dream than earth-bound, far more likely to bear the sting of the unrequited.”

        For me that passage contains an essential quality in my work that is best illustrated in this passage from “Papa Where Were You.”

In pictures of myself when I was growing up,

          I cannot find you.  I search through a catalog

          Of memories, old pictures, frayed and yellowed.

          You are not there.  Papa, where were you

          While mama kept our kitchen warm, covered up

          Your absence so it was years before we realized

          That you were rarely home.

 The one presence I never imagined becoming slowly absent was my husband. Although he was always a very healthy person, his body has been ravaged by early onset Parkinson’s disease.  To watch these changes in his once strong body is unsettling. In “The Ghosts in Our Bed” I suggest how the shadow image of his younger self is always present to me:

The Ghosts In Our Bed

          To My Husband Who Has Early Onset Parkinson's Disease 

The mahogany four-poster bed your mother left us

is high up off the floor.  It folds us into

the smell of lavender in sheets sprinkled with violets

the thick blue and green comforter.

For years we are happy in it,

lusty and young and so alive together,

this safe place to which we return each night

to lie in each other's arms, warm and exactly

where we want to be.

Now, when we climb into our bed, those people

who for so many years were ourselves, the ghosts

that we live with, sleep between us.

You have become so fragile.  You are always

cold and need extra blankets, and you sleep

so quietly, your arms folded across your chest,

that when I wake up in the night, I have to reach out

to find you because I'm not certain you're there.

You used to take up so much space, with your energy

and strength, the big bones of your body,

I pile blankets on you, now,

your face rigid and frozen even in sleep.

The ghosts of the future hover over us, reminding us

 every night of how much more we have to lose,

even as out old ghosts whisper, "Remember, remember."

I fall asleep with my hand on your shoulder,

to keep you with me as long as I can.

This idea of keeping loved ones with you as long as you can is certainly a product of the closeness of my own Italian family. I felt lucky that my father lived into his 90s, especially after we lost my mother to cancer so quickly. Each night during the last years of his life, I would go to his house and sit with him. He would tell me stories of his family and his life. He would reveal secrets I had never known. He even still did his bills and our taxes. I finally fully understood what an amazing man he was. Although he always had jobs such as janitor or night watchman and my mother worked in a factory sewing sleeves into coats, they managed to buy a two-family house. I realized that there was so much to admire in this man and his outlook on life. I felt ashamed that I had betrayed and denied him during my life because I took on the attitudes of other Americans about class and ethnicity.  Through these last years with him, I fully reinvisioned myself and my heritage and finally could speak about my shame and voice my pride in my family as I do in the poem, “Daddy, We called You.”

“Daddy, We called You”

Daddy, We Called You

"Daddy"  we called you, "Daddy"

when we talked to each other in the street,

pulling on our American faces,

shaping our lives in Paterson slang.

Inside our house, we spoke

a Southern Italian dialect

mixed with English

and we called you "Papa"

but outside again, you became Daddy

and we spoke of you to our friends

as "my father"

imagining we were speaking

of that "Father Knows Best"

T.V. character

in his dark business suit,

carrying his briefcase into his house,

retreating to his paneled den,

his big living room and dining room,

his frilly-aproned wife

who greeted him at the door

with a kiss.  Such space

and silence in that house.

We lived in one big room-

living room, dining room, kitchen, bedroom,

all in one, dominated by the gray oak dining table

around which we sat, talking and laughing,

listening to your stories,

your political arguments with your friends,

Papa, how you glowed in company light,

happy when the other immigrants

came to you for help with their taxes

or legal papers.

It was only outside that glowing circle

that I denied you, denied your long hours

as night watchman in Royal Machine Shop.

One night, riding home from a  date,

my middle class, American boyfriend

kissed me at the light;  I looked up

and met your eyes as you stood at the corner

near Royal Machine.  It  was nearly midnight.

January.  Cold and Windy.  You were waiting

for the bus, the streetlight illuminating

your face.  I pretended I did not see you,

let my boyfriend pull away, leaving you

on the empty corner waiting for the bus

to take you home.  You never mentioned it,

never said that you knew

how often I lied about what you did for a living

or that I was ashamed to have my boyfriend see you,

find out about your second shift work, your broken English.

Today, remembering that moment,

still illuminated in my mind

by the streetlamp's gray light,

I think of my own son

and the distance between us,

greater than miles.

Papa,

silk worker,

janitor,

night watchman,

immigrant Italian,

I honor the years you spent in menial work

while your mind, so quick and sharp,

longed to escape,

honor the times you got out of bed

after sleeping only an hour,

to take me to school or pick me up;

the warm bakery rolls you bought for me

on the way home from the night shift.

the letters

you wrote

to the editors

of local newspapers.

Papa,

silk worker,

janitor,

night watchman,

immigrant Italian,

better than any "Father Knows Best" father,

bland as white rice,

with your wine press in the cellar,

with the newspapers you collected

out of garbage piles to turn into money

you banked for us,

with your mouse traps,

with your cracked and calloused hands,

with your yellowed teeth.

Papa,

dragging your dead leg

through the factories of Paterson,

I am outside the house now,

shouting your name.

The poems quoted in this paper are reprinted from my books WINTER LIGHT (Midland Park,NJ,1985); WHERE I COME FROM: New and Selected Poems (Toronto, Canada: Guernica Editions, 1995, 1998); and THINGS MY MOTHER TOLD ME (Toronto, Canada: Guernica Editions, 1999).

© All Copyright, Maria Mazziotti Gillan
All Rights Reserved. Printed By Permission.