The ship that took my mother to Ellis Island <br />Eighty-three years ago was named "The Mercy." <br />She remembers trying to eat a banana <br />without first peeling it and seeing her first orange <br />in the hands of a young Scot, a seaman <br />who gave her a bite and wiped her mouth for her <br />with a red bandana and taught her the word, <br />"orange," saying it patiently over and over. <br />A long autumn voyage, the days darkening <br />with the black waters calming as night came on, <br />then nothing as far as her eyes could see and space <br />without limit rushing off to the corners <br />of creation. She prayed in Russian and Yiddish <br />to find her family in New York, prayers <br />unheard or misunderstood or perhaps ignored <br />by all the powers that swept the waves of darkness <br />before she woke, that kept "The Mercy" afloat <br />while smallpox raged among the passengers <br />and crew until the dead were buried at sea <br />with strange prayers in a tongue she could not fathom. <br />"The Mercy," I read on the yellowing pages of a book <br />I located in a windowless room of the library <br />on 42nd Street, sat thirty-one days <br />offshore in quarantine before the passengers <br />disembarked. There a story ends. Other ships <br />arrived, "Tancred" out of Glasgow, "The Neptune" <br />registered as Danish, "Umberto IV," <br />the list goes on for pages, November gives <br />way to winter, the sea pounds this alien shore. <br />Italian miners from Piemonte dig <br />under towns in western Pennsylvania <br />only to rediscover the same nightmare <br />they left at home. A nine-year-old girl travels <br />all night by train with one suitcase and an orange. <br />She learns that mercy is something you can eat <br />again and again while the juice spills over <br />your chin, you can wipe it away with the back <br />of your hands and you can never get enough.<br /><br />Philip Levine<br /><br />http://www.poemhunter.com/poem/the-mercy/
