Immigrant Picnic
~ By Gregory Djanikian
It's the Fourth of July, the flags
are painting the town,
the plastic forks and knives
are laid out like a parade.
And I'm grilling, I've got my apron,
I've got potato salad, macaroni, relish,
I've got a hat shaped
like the state of Pennsylvania.
I ask my father what's his pleasure
and he says, "Hot dog, medium rare,"
and then, "Hamburger, sure,
what's the big difference,"
as if he's really asking.
I put on hamburgers and hot dogs,
slice up the sour pickles and Bermudas,
uncap the condiments. The paper napkins
are fluttering away like lost messages.
"You're running around," my mother says,
"like a chicken with its head loose."
"Ma," I say, "you mean cut off,
loose and cut off being as far apart
as, say, son and daughter."
She gives me a quizzical look as though
I've been caught in some impropriety.
"I love you and your sister just the same," she says,
"Sure," my grandmother pipes in,
"you're both our children, so why worry?"
That's not the point I begin telling them,
and I'm comparing words to fish now,
like the ones in the sea at Port Said,
or like birds among the date palms by the Nile,
unrepentantly elusive, wild.
"Sonia," my father says to my mother,
"what the hell is he talking about?"
"He's on a ball," my mother says.
"That's roll!" I say, throwing up my hands,
"as in hot dog, hamburger, dinner roll...."
"And what about roll out the barrels?" my mother asks,
and my father claps his hands, "Why sure," he says,
"let's have some fun," and launches
into a polka, twirling my mother
around and around like the happiest top,
and my uncle is shaking his head, saying
"You could grow nuts listening to us,"
and I'm thinking of pistachios in the Sinai
burgeoning without end,
pecans in the South, the jumbled
flavor of them suddenly in my mouth,
wordless, confusing,
crowding out everything else.
As an accomplished poet, Gregory Djanikian captures the immigrant childhood experience. Born in Alexandria, Egypt, his Armenian parents brought him to the United States at 8 years old. He grew up in Pennsylvania eating hot dogs and hamburgers on the Fourth of July. Holidays are the great melting pot of a nation.
How do you navigate a world that you do not understand? Gregory’s parents (and my own) did it with joy and hope.
How do you live in a world that your parents do not understand? with exasperation and eventual understanding.
How do you share the wisdom of experience? with stories… some are lived, some are told, and some become art.
In some way, we are all immigrants entering into an ever-changing world. The world of our parents is inevitably different from our own, and the world of our childhood is not the one that we will pass on to the next generation. We can only hope that the there is some wisdom in our unique but universal experiences that we can extract and offer as touchstones.
Reference
- PoetryFoundation.org
- Read the poem in the issue below:
