As we all navigate what might turn out to be a brand-new world, it helps to go to the water, our place of origin, and to just listen to it meet the shore.
I don’t like to “interpret” a poem, as I feel there is more value in a person coming to it whole, without preconceptions. Please enjoy.
The Adjustments
When coffee first arrived in Europe,
It was referred to as “Arabian wine.”
In turn-of-the-century San Francisco,
The Bank of America began as the Bank of Italy.
When Cortés arrived at Tenochtitlán on November 8, 1519,
Moctezuma II greeted him warmly, and kissed his hand.
All of that. We are amazed by the smallest of things
Coming before us, the facts that seem so strange to us now
As we live in their opposite rooms.
In 1935, reports say, when Isaac Bashevis Singer
Arrived in New York, he was thirty years old
And could speak only three words in English:
“Take a chair.”
But then he learned other words. It helped.