Feile-Festa - Spring 2006

FEILE-FESTA
Spring 2006

Prose

No Matter How Far
- L. Dolan
Ireland and Sicily: Two Islands
- E. Farinella
Southern Exposure
- M. Lisella
Because She Was
- J. O’Loughlin
Flying
- P. Schoenwaldt
Review of DANCES WITH LUIGI
- T. Zeppetella

FEATURED ARTIST
Melissa Kennedy

BIOGRAPHIES

Contributors

Daniela Gioseffi

DON’T SPEAK THE LANGUAGE OF THE ENEMY

"DON'T SPEAK the LANGUAGE of the ENEMY!"
reads the poster at the end of a grey alleyway
of childhood, where the raggedy guineas of Newark
whisper quietly in their dialects on concrete steps
far from blue skies, olive groves or hyacinths.

Bent in a shadow toward the last
of sunlight above tenement roofs,
Grandpa Galileo sadly sips homemade wine
hums moaning with his broken mandolin.
Children play hide-and-seek
in dusty evening streets as red sauce
simmers, hour after hour, on coal stoves,
garlic, oil, crushed tomatoes blended
with precious pinches of salt and basilico—
a pot that must last a week of suppers.
The fathers' hands with blackened finger nails,
are worn rough with iron wrought, bricks laid,
ditches dug, glass etched.

Wilted women in black cotton dresses wait in twilight,
calling their listless children to scrubbed linoleum kitchens.
In cold water flats with tin tables, stale bread
is ladled with sauce, then baked to revive edibility.
Clothes soak in kitchen laundry-tubs, washboards afloat.
Strains of radio opera are interrupted by war bulletins.

The poster pasted on the fence at the end of the block
streaked with setting sun and rain reads:
"DON'T SPEAK the LANGUAGE of the ENEMY!"

But, the raggedy guineas can speak no other,
and so they murmur in their rooms in the secret
dark frightened of the camps* where people like them
are caged in the new land of golden opportunity.
They whisper of Mussolini's stupidity—stifling
the mother tongue, wounding the father's pride.
urging their children to speak English by daylight,
telling each other, "We are Americans. God bless America !"

*It's a little remembered fact that there were concentration camps for 500,000 innocent Italian immigrants in the United States during World War II, exactly like those in which 170,000 Japanese immigrants were incarcerated.