Kathleen O’Toole: Migrations

On exiting “Warmth of Other Suns” at the Phillips Collection, 2020

I. Barrage

Out of the January afternoon glare
into a barrage: old photos of human cargo
on transatlantic steamers, circa 1900;
dramatic, undersea film of the roiling
“Mare Nostrum” −Mare Monstrum to
the poor and desperate. A framed letter
from the mayor of Lampidusa, Italy,
2012, laments the dozens of African women
and children he buried in just one week.

II. Connections

Black and whites of crammed steamers,
arrival captions: Italian girl finds her first penny,
Italian mother and Child, Ellis Island,
conjure my grandmother Domenica’s 1920
passage. From what port in Italy −Napoli…
Genoa…did she depart? And just how many
were crammed into steerage with her
on that vessel? The story goes: she’d dug
so many graves for flu victims in Abruzzo,
that she latched onto the first local lad
heading across and looking for a wife.
No mention of how she felt being pinched
and photographed, examined (notation:
pregnant) after weeks on unforgiving seas.

III. Diasporas

The salvaged garments of desperate Somalis,
Sudanese, Syrians and Iraqis lie piled
in a room-sized artist’s rendition of turbulent
waters. Next door, a bright gauntlet: Southern
Blacks stream northward fleeing Jim Crow
in Lawrence’s Migration Series, landing
in ghettoed neighborhoods, lives of factory
soot and domestic work once they arrive.

IV. Encuentro

Without warning, the terrain shifts southwest
to Mexican migrants in some US border town.

They are filmed sitting around a table,
so that we in the dark gallery occupy
the end seat, listen as they share aspirations,
and all the threats already overcome
through luck and grit, or la gracia de Dios:
barricades, desert posses and border patrols −
brick bats standing in for all our fears.
One burly father visibly weeps, hearing
their leader’s litany of all they’ve wagered,
imagined, and all they’ve left behind. In this
intimate space, how can we not also bear
witness, this weight: their crossing over,
in the hope to begin again.

~~~~

Kathleen O’Toole is a poet and faith-based social activist, as well as former Poet Laureate of Takoma Park, MD. Her collections of poetry include This Far (Paraclete Press, 2019).

Poem published in Notre Dame Review, 57 (Spring/Summer 2024). Included in Vox Populi by permission of the author.