La Dolce Vita (poem)

He arrived here not from Italia, for in 1920
    a man's country was still la famiglia,
And affairs of state were conducted in the green
    vineyards surrounding a man's village,
Where the only officialdom was one's compare
    e commare, and commerce was solely weighed
In the coin of familial interest:  il papa
Would consult his kin, and then rule ex cathedra.

No, he arrived not from Italia but from Benevento,
    a small wine-growing village perched high
On the slopes of the wind-swept and scraggy Dolomites
    where his family had grown olives and bambinos
In equal profusion for centuries, slowly despoiling
    the land which had once nurtured; at age nine
He boarded a boat bound for Ellis Island, the first
Of the many ambassadors his family would send.

He joined his many fellow contadinos
    in the Little Italy of Boston's North End,
And soon was laying tracks for the Boston & Maine;
    he prospered, built himself a neat white home
In the suburbs, took a young immigrant la donna
    to be his wife and created his own famiglia
Of eleven children, the seventh being il primo figlio.
He began to call himself Frank, not Fortunato,

And started pronouncing his surname as an American,
    had running water and electricity, used his phone,
And even learned to drive the second-hand Olds
    he bought from someone who had come from the Capua
Area, too--but when I met him when he was old
    and retired, I would watch him stand out back
Where his garden grew, and I would watch him caress
His plum tomatoes with an almost appalling tenderness.

"Pomodori," he softly chanted, weighing the heft
    of that ancient word against this alien world
For whose tongue he no longer had any use; and lifting
    a rubbed red radish to his sly smiling mouth,
He would  whisper "ravanelli" to himself, soft
    and low, savoring the radish-sharp retort
Of that first bite--and in that child's moment unfurled
All my ageless time, and endless echoes first heard.