Queens, 1963 by Julia Alvarez
Everyone seemed more American
than we, newly arrived,
foreign dirt still on our soles.
By year’s end, a sprinkler waving
like a flag on our mowed lawn,
we were blended into the block,
owned our own mock Tudor house.
Then the house across the street
sold to a black family.
Cop cars patrolled our block
from the Castellucci’s at one end
to the Balakian’s on the other.
We heard rumors of bomb threats,
a burning cross on their lawn.
(It turned out to be a sprinkler.)
Still the neighborhood buzzed.
The barber’s family, Haralambides,
our left-side neighbors, didn’t want trouble.
They’d come a long way to be free!
Mr. Scott, the retired plumber,
and his plump midwestern wife,
considered moving back home
where white and black got along
by staying where they belonged.
They had cultivated our street
like the garden she’d given up
on account of her ailing back,
bad knees, poor eyes, arthritic hands.
She went through her litany daily.
Politely, my mother listened—
Ay, Mrs. Scott, que pena!
—her Dominican good manners
still running on automatic.
The Jewish counselor next door,
had a practice in her house;
clients hurried up her walk
ashamed to be seen needing.
(I watched from my upstairs window,
Gloomy with adolescence,
And guessed how they too must have
Hypocritical old-world parents.)
Mrs. Bernstein said it was time
T\the neighborhood opened up.
As the first Jew on the block,
she remembered the snubbing she got
a few years back from Mrs. Scott.
But real estate worried her,
our houses’ plummeting value.
She shook her head as she might
at a client’s grim disclosures.
Too bad the world works this way.
The German girl playing the piano
down the street abruptly stopped
in the middle of a note.
I completed the tune in my head
as I watched their front door open.
A dark man in a suit
with a girl about my age
walked quickly into a car.
My hand lifted but fell
before I made a welcoming gesture.
On her face I had seen a look
from the days before we had melted
into the United States of America.
It was hardness mixed with hurt.
It was knowing she could never be
the right kind of American.
A police car followed their car.
Down the street, curtains fell back.
Mrs. Scott swept her walk
as if it had just been dirtied.
Then the German piano commenced
downward scales as if tracking
the plummeting real estate.
One by one I imagined the houses
sinking into their lawns,
the grass grown wild and tall
in the past tense of this continent
before the first foreigners owned
any of this free country.
I don’t understand what we have to write on the lesson plan, maybe an example of ur own lesson plan would work perfectly. What i did with mine was actually take notes on it, not plan things to do while teaching… so i definitely did it wrong 😦
There is a filled out lesson plan in your packet with suggestions of what to do in each portion of the lesson. You did the right thing by taking notes on your poem–now decide what you want your “students” to notice. What do you want them to do first to get them ready to consider this poem? That will tie into your “Do First.” Will they need any information or definitions in order to understand the poem as well as you did? That will tie into the Introduction.
–Honore
This is how you post a comment. 😉 🙂 LOLOLOLOLOLOLOL
Band-aid… (:::[ ]:::)
Heart… ❤
Sad… 😦
How does this poem relate to Fences by August Wilson. Can anyone help me out here please.
Hi
Thanks for posting this. I have an assignment for this where I have to compare it to “A Rasin in the Sun”, it’s in the book but I’m too lazy to open it. lol
lmaoooooo