They haunted three rooms in an old Newark house
where the sun never came save to lighten the sills,
the pigeons in the eaves
cooed softly all morning.
My grandparents lived there 10 years
and never conquered America
instead, they staked the soil in the back lot downstairs,
cleared away leaking drums and Campbell’s soup cans.
While incoming planes flew too close to the ground
they tilled and they hoed ’til the kale came up.
In the fall they picked the tartest green grapes
off the vines they'd sent curling up the fire escape,
and they hummed softly while they worked
a tune they'd picked up from the black-and-white TV set;
they remembered that long after the images faded.
I sing their jingle when I'm feeling nostalgic.
Paula Neves, a native of the Newark area, is a graduate student in English and creative writing at Rutgers-Newark.
