The Immigrants
By Stephen Mack Jones
They were
from the very beginning
stillborn, white as bone.
Ghosts
stumbling through withered fields
with hunger held like the swaddled corpses
of newborns
close to their naked ribs, and breathing
each other’s cholera.
Incinerated with the typhoid fever of their neighbor
They are collapsed in on themselves,
gaunt
Sinking into the dysentery mud
of an unfamiliar shore, dirty hands
pressing pristine rosaries to parched lips,
slobbering the Hail Mary from collective mouths,
giving thanks
for having survived the journey to this Promised Land with only lice,
tick bites and vacant stares from eyes starved of hope
Widows and whores, petty thieves and priests
And always failed farmers,
all weeping as they scratched
at diseased dirt of their home
A battered and bruised bloodline,
mongrelized
by the occasional English rape
These immigrants
long ago (and perhaps tomorrow)
driven by the brutality of men, the capricious cruelty of a revered God
to a rough-hewn namesake a thousand miles away
A Hail Mary enclave of other empty bellies and dream seekers in
Corktown.
Stephen Mack Jones is a poet, playwright, and award winning novelist of the August Snow series living in the metro Detroit area.
