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21st June, 2024

Friday Poem – ‘Nursery Tales’ by Caroline Smith

Photo of the statue of liberty surrounded by morning mist.

This week’s Friday Poem is ‘Nursery Tales’ by Caroline Smith from her collection The Immigration Handbook.

Nursery Tales
Fearful of the dreams she carries
for her unborn child, she feels
the bunch and swoop of her stomach.
She thinks of her grandfather,
a poor Italian immigrant
crossing to America in steerage:
the motion sickness, his stiff cramped limbs
in the hold and the burials at sea from small-pox.
As a small boy, he’d watched on deck
as red hot stones were sewn into greased sheets
and thrown overboard ahead of the bodies
to disperse the circling sharks.
Before poverty and disenchantment had
seared his unsuspecting heart, he had talked
to her of the water, the longing and
waiting, the endless swell of the sea, until
pigeons replaced sea birds. And at
last the sight of Liberty through the mist.