Poem: Carrying Their Hometowns to Paterson

Carrying Their Hometowns to Paterson

On the street where I grew up,

everyone knew everyone else.

We knew each other’s secrets,

though we pretended we didn’t.

Our street was lined with

two-and three-family houses

full of immigrants from southern Italy.

There was one young Irish couple - 

they moved out quickly.

Another Italian family moved in.

These immigrants came from Cilento

and Calabria and Sicily. Paterson, at the time,

had fifty Italian societies,

named for different southern Italian regions and towns.

My father belonged to the Cilentano society

where he went to play cards

and argue about politics with the other men.

The members of the ladies' auxiliary cooked

spaghetti dinners for the men

at least once a month. On our street

it was as though these new immigrants

carried their hometowns to Paterson,

carrying their dialects and mores

and the pungent cheeses their relatives sent to them

so they’d have a piece of home

to remind them of the past.

On summer evenings, they would sit around

oilcloth-covered tables under the grape arbors

they had planted, playing cards and talking.

They needed their countrymen to replace the relatives

they had left behind in those Italian villages,

the people they never saw again who became

like stick figures, gradually fading into lines

from the blue airmail letters they sent and received,

and they worked hard in America, where the streets

were not paved in gold, but where they knew

they could give their children better lives

than what they could have given them

if they’d stayed in the mountain villages

they called home.

by Maria Mazziotti Gillan

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Maria Mazziotti Gillan's newest poetry collection is When the Stars Were Still Visible (2021). Other recent publications are the poetry and photography collection, Paterson Light and Shadow, and the poetry collections What Blooms in Winter and The Girls in the Chartreuse Jackets, a pairing of her poems with her paintings.
Maria's artist website is MariaMazziottiGillan.com and her poetry website is MariaGillan.com.