Immigrant Hearts

My

Heart

Loves home

Winter snow

Spring mountain flowers

Summer salt in the deep, wide sea

Fall leaves on the colorful trees are art for my heart

With tears in eyes, my heart pulls on it’s brown tattered coat, black holey shoes and red wool scarf

My heart is so tired, poor, huddled, wretched, homeless and tempest-tost. It loves it’s memories, family, home but it is time for me to go

Too many cold, deserted eyes at checkpoints in lonely streets pointed guns at my heart; too many clouds in rainy seasons empty of rain brought pain to my heart; too many coughs from my children's chests late into night broke my heart

My heart picks up it’s battered suitcase, with tape all around the ends, lest it break open and spill out my father's favorite shirt, a love letter, a picture of my beautiful children, all I have in the world, onto the ground

Deep in the hull of a ship tossing on stormy seas; high on the roof of a train winding down a long, steep hill; barefoot on a dusty road

Silent, back to back, knee to knee, with poor women and little children…immigrant hearts

With each step along the way our hearts whisper, "Help us"

With each mile they long for, "I care"

They hope for kindness

Immigrants

Moving

Their

Hearts

52 Blue

Whale

Song

Lonely

Where are you?

Wandering, singing

Singing unheard wandering songs

“Can you hear me? Are you there? Are you? 

I am alone”

Listening, longing for songs gently sung

”I hear you, words on water, I’m here,

I’m here”

We sing at diff’rent frequencies

Migrate along diff’rent routes

Wandering, wondering

Unheard, unknown

Wandering the sea

Words on water

Singing unheard wondering songs

Wondering, singing

Who are you?

Gentle

Song

Whale

Small Spaces

They

stood

closely,

side by side.

She reached out for him

and took his hand inside of hers.

Their fingers intertwined and their palms made a small space.

The space was warm in the midst of the deep snow that covered the frozen ground of Point Hope,

was warm against the icy wind that blew off the rocking water of the Chukchi Sea.

“Life is in those small places between us,” said the wind.

They stood quietly hand in hand,

holding the small space

between them

holding

warm

hands.

Hilcias and the Whales

Hilcias loved whales. 

He would walk beside his abuelo down rows of tomato plants and peach trees, shielded from the sun by his trusty cap with a whale on the front of it.

“A blue whale’s heart is the size of a Volkswagen Beetle. A beluga whale is called the canary of the sea because it sings so much. A fin whale can make a sound on our side of the Atlantic Ocean and another fin whale on the other side of the Atlantic Ocean can hear it,” he whistled.

“Boy,” his abuelo would smile, “You must be whistling about whales.”

Now, as he sat beside his side of the Atlantic Ocean in a state park on Kiawah Island, something wonderful happened.

A gigantic tooth and a mysterious conch shell washed up with the waves onto the shore.

He was astonished.

The tooth was a sperm whale's tooth, of this he was sure.

The sperm whale was one of his favorite whales.

The first picture he had ever drawn of a whale, before he had visited the public library and checked out every book he could find about whales, before he had memorized the field guide to the whales of the world, he had sketched a picture of how he thought a whale should look, and that picture was a picture of a sperm whale.

He picked up the tooth. It was a foot long, shaped like a cone, and made of ivory. 

"This came from the lower jaw of a sperm whale," he thought, "Because they don't have any teeth in their upper jaws, only slots that the teeth from the lower jaws can fit into.”

“If I could slice the tooth in half, it would show the age of the whale as the rings of a trunk show the age of the tree.”

He couldn't believe his luck.

He gently laid the tooth beside him on the sand.

He picked up the conch shell with both of his hands. "What a wonderful shell,” he thought. “Look at it’s shape and color.”

The shape was a common shape in nature, formed by graphing the numbers 0, 1, 1, 2, 3, 5, 8, 13..., the Fibonacci numbers, a special shape that also appears many times in geometry, architecture, art and music.

Some people called the shape God’s blueprint.

It's color was a common color in nature, too. It was three shades of yellow. It's spine was the bright yellow of the sun that very morning. It's siphonal canal was the quiet yellow of the corn he and his abuelo shucked in August. It's aperture was the deep yellow of sunflowers in a field.

He raised it to his tiny ear. 

Someone had told him once that if you hold a conch shell to your ear, you can hear the ocean inside of it. 

"I wonder if it's true," he thought. 

"I can take it home to our bus and listen tonight and see if I can bring the ocean with me wherever I go. If I can, then, in a small way, I can bring the great whales with me, too."

He expected to hear only the ocean. 

Boy, was he surprised. 

The sound he heard inside the shell wasn’t just of breaking waves and rolling tides. 

Within the sound of the sea was a song.

It was the most beautiful song he had ever heard. 

He closed his eyes and saw the notes dancing before him. “This song comes from a humpback whale,” he thought.

“I...understand it. I understand it!”

The whale sang to him in his own language, with his own whistles!

They were notes of love, forgiveness, faith, hope, light, joy, consolation, and understanding - all of the notes he whistled, all of the notes that made up his life, all of the notes that he whistled to the world but that the world couldn’t understand, all of those notes came back to him in the song of the humpback whale.

A tear rolled down his cheek, and then he wept as if all of the hatred, injury, doubt, despair, darkness, sadness and loneliness poured out of him onto the sand and into the vast waters of the ocean.

“I hear you! I understand you!” he whistled into the shell.

To his great surprise he heard, “I hear you, too! I understand you! Finally, we’ve found you!”

A humpback whale, a sperm whale and a blue whale surfaced out beyond the waves.

“There’s a story we tell along our migratory routes,” sang the whales, “About a boy on land, a boy who can whistle our language and understand our songs, a boy who is hope.”

“You’re that boy, Hilcias.

“You’re that boy.”

“Me?” 

“You.”

“But, how?”

“We’re looking for a lonely whale,” sang the whales.

“We call him 52 Blue because he sings at a frequency we cannot hear.”

“We think you’ll be able to hear him.” 

“And he’ll be able to hear you.”

“And that might just help save the world.”

Taki and the Whale

In a place that hadn’t been seen by many people, she hadn’t been seen by many people either, for she lived in the far north, in the Arctic Circle, beside the Chukchi Sea, in a village named Point Hope.

The Iñuit people there knew from the beginning that every snowflake that falls from the sky anywhere in the whole wide world is unique. 

No two snowflakes have ever been alike. No two snowflakes are ever alike. No two snowflakes will ever be alike. 

The crystals that form and make a snowflake are so sensitive to the conditions around them that a breeze blowing over the ice, a cloud passing between the sun and the earth, or the vibrations from the heartbeat of a bowhead whale surfacing on the waters of the Chukchi Sea can change them into something new.

Taki’s mother and father knew she was like a snowflake.

In the first moments of her life, her mother swaddled her in a warm blanket her grandmother had made just for her.

Her Grandmother had sewn the three Arctic whales into that red blanket with yellow thread the color of the morning sunrise over the icy waters.

"With the beluga whale, I hope curiosity and song into the life of the baby," she had whispered, "For the beluga look quizzical in the way they look at you and sing songs that cause us to call them the canaries of the sea.”

“With the narwhal whale, I hope compassion and empathy into the life of the baby, for the narwhal will place the tip of it's own hornlike tooth into the broken tooth of another narwhal to ease it’s suffering and pain.”

“And with the bowhead whale, I hope mystery and endurance into the life of the baby, for the bowhead's name is Balaena mysticetus and that best describes it's wonderful, mysterious ways.  It lives longer than any other creature in the world for it’s heart beats slow and strong in the cold, cold Arctic water.”

As Taki looked up into the weathered faces of her parents with her deep brown eyes, she whistled a beautiful song her Father had heard only once before in his life.

As a boy, he had been roaming across the ice near the edge of the sea, hunting bowhead whales with his father. There, as he stood still and silent beside the water, a bowhead rose to breathe in air.

The bowhead whale was a source of life and pride for the Iñuit people. They subsisted on it’s body and bones, eating it’s blubber to keep them warm in deep winter, using it’s skin and baleen to make their boats and fishing nets, and using it’s skeleton to frame their small huts. 

They whispered it’s name with reverence and awe.

He raised the harpoon to strike the great whale, and he whispered an old Iñuit prayer his grandmother had taught him.

I think over again

My small adventures

My fears,

Those small ones

That seemed so big

For all the vital things

I had to get and reach

And yet there is only one

Great thing,

The only thing

To live to see

The great day

That dawns

And the light that fills

The world

He plunged the harpoon into the whale.

He would remember that moment for all of his life.

Normally, when a bowhead whale is struck with the sharpened iron barbs of a harpoon, it dives into the deepest parts of the waters and flees across the sea, trying with all it’s might to get away and stay alive.

This whale, though, was not a normal whale. 

It was like a snowflake.

As he looked into the eyes of the great whale, as he watched the light go out of it’s wise eyes, he thought, “This whale is willingly giving it’s life for the lives of my people.”

The last sound it made was the beautiful whistling song that Taki made on that day of her birth.

As her mother and father looked down at her, they wondered if her song would reach the tiny, powerful ears and the giant, kind hearts of all of the bowhead whales around them.

They wondered if the ancient wisdom of sacrificial love was working in the world again.

Hilcias and the Old Woman

“Po lidda fella.” 

The old, weathered woman had skin as dark and wrinkled as bark and arms as thin and knobby as the farthest branches of the island’s ancient oak trees. 

She spoke with the flavor of her Gullah ancestors, who had created a new language in the lowcountry of South Carolina by mixing the west African rhythms they had learned on their momma’s knees with the English they

had learned when they were stolen away from their own people and lands and brought here to the American South.

She lived in a holey floored, crack walled, Duck tape windowed shotgun shack on John’s Island left over from the days of slavery and Jim Crow. 

She fished along the inlet and shoreline each morning, trying to catch red fish, sea trout and flounder to go with the fruits and vegetables she grew in her garden. 

She wove sweet grass into baskets in a roadside market from the late mornings to the early afternoons, until it was time to go home and cook supper for her husband and five children.

“Jus sits dere. Eva monin’ as de sun rises ova de ocean an sits on de wada like a ripe tomata. Neva says anything. Jus sits dere a’watchin de wada and a’list’nin to de waves.”

She walked over to him and stood beside him. She placed her bony hand gently on his head. Her shadow fell over him and protected him from the light and heat of the sun.

“Wha’s yo name?” she asked kindly. “My name’s Mattie. Could you tell me yo name?”

He turned his earthy brown eyes to her. 

He didn’t say one thing, didn’t utter one word.

She figured he didn’t understand her. 

His Mami and Abuelo were migrant workers, picking peaches and tomatoes in the lowcountry summers, then moving on down the coasts of Georgia and Florida with the falls and winters. 

Theirs was a migratory life, moving with the hard work, scrabbling a life.

“Maybe he only understands Spanish”, she thought, for he and his family had made it to the United States from the farms and fields of El Salvador in Central America.

Suddenly, he whistled. 

This astonished her, and she almost fell over into the sand because of it.

The sound was unlike any whistle she had ever heard before. 

A usual whistle has two notes and a high pitch, but his was an unusual whistle. It had all kinds of notes in it, and the pitch went high and low, low and high and all kinds of places in between. 

It was as if the great composers had written his whistle at the height of their compositional powers.

“Ya know,” she said in hushed tones to the women weaving sweetgrass baskets around her later that day, “It was like he was a’tryin to say sumpin to me in a bee-yoo-tee-ful way, but I din’ hab no idée whad id was.”

He simply looked back over the water and the sky again, and was very still and very quiet.