broken english

(the assignment was to write a poem about a parent.)

once there was a little girl who climbed
the mango tree in her backyard
(she was only five years old;
her sister was eleven)

but then the winds changed,
a promise of freedom with
a risk much too high to accept,
and she was rushed off

further south
(she was thousands of miles away when
she heard about mr. oswald's terrible feat)
and she moved around,

way up north, south again, then north once more
to pursue what she loved —
the way things looked
the beautiful way things could look

and she learned to speak in yet another language
and to draw designs that would make people smile
and she went to the big city to be an american
and she worked at a corporation, where she met this man

i don't know where she started believing in god
or in andy warhol or ralph nader
or in the clash or the ramones
or in health food and her children

but when i hear her speak on the phone,
bits of english dotted along the stream of french,
then i think, what if
i had been cuban like her
after all?