The Trams Ran in Leningrad

Eurus, the east wind,
that harbinger of change,
comes furiously onto the peninsula.
I can’t escape this wet breeze
it dampens the skin and
inundates my nostrils.

I embark to the
Swap Shop Flea Market
looking for --what?--, nothing.

All I see and hear are,
Haitians hawking hosiery.

Pushcart memories of
Blake Avenue Brooklyn,
with Jewish merchants and
Yiddish and Brooklyn Dodgers,

it seemed so natural there,
but here in Florida, so foreign.

How strange was it for my
grandfathers to sell fish
from the back of trucks?

Proustian memories:
Oh, a Knish and a Cel-Ray
would have put me in a
trance of things past.
How much has changed
and what has remained the same
and why memories should revive
a dead past peopled by the dead;
troubles and haunts me.

Are they still here because
I think of them and their lives
foreign to those outside
the ghetto of Brooklyn?

And the segregated ghetto
of Florida as the Haitians
make their way with children
and backpacks and homework
and an undying ideal of America.

That, I, jaded and unproductive
--as a pensioner-- can’t fathom
except in dreams and memories
and memorials.

Maybe the Dream is alive
to people who live for the future,
when the past
is too painful
to contemplate.

The Germans lay siege to
Leningrad for 900 days.
The Trams still ran.

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Tony Puma/MMXIV