To celebrate National Poetry Month, The Poetry Box is sharing a Poem-of-the-Day, selected from various anthologies and individual poet collections that we have published over the years.
Please enjoy today’s selection: “Migrant Heart” by Lynn M. Knapp, which appears in her book, Giving Ground:
Migrant Heart
Parched, earth-brown skin,
an unexplored continent,
watered with sweat,
a bronze photo holds him fast.
Sleek black hair,
sleepy dark eyes,
slow, full-lipped smile,
a young man
in a schoolroom full of children,
a twelve-year-old Tejano boy
who arrived every spring to work
in onion and asparagus fields.
On rare rainy days
Alfredo sat one row over
in a two-room school,
his blue flannel shirt still dusty
from the farm.
I moved from grade school
to middle school,
waiting each day
for him to climb aboard the bus,
but he could not follow,
he could not cross
from his world to mine.
Instead he followed the sun,
the seasons, crop to crop,
field to field.
J. Kopp says
Gives me chills! How true and how unfair we treat our immigrants! I love your poem, Lynn!