Two Oceans, Poem Example

When I was a child, I never dreamed I’d to leave my hometown by the Ligurian Sea. In the ocean’s panorama, I gazed on the lights of  Porto Maurizio reflecting with the full moon on gentle waves. I watched the sky, so blue and soulful over the cresting Cathedral of San Maurizio, the black undersides of storm-clouds brooding above Old Town, the Parasio.   This was paradise at the beginning of all my days. A hometown of flower-harvesters, tourists, and olive grows. As I grew, I learned the maze of carrugi, the narrow streets of markets and stores. All through my  hometown, greenhouses burst with rainbows of flowers. I found myself always somewhere betwen the sea and sky like a falling raindrop that never reaches the earth.  My dream was that the whole world was as beautiful and tranquil as Imperia.

Now as an Italian in Miami, I watch glass and concrete skyscrapers scorch the sky and crowd against the beach like monoliths. Speed and flash are the words that are best to describe life in this pulsing city of wealth and crime.  Crowds of people scatter litter and conversations in a dozen different languages. Police chase, pursue, and shadow. The sky is ripped apart by jet after jet and, at night, satellites and the private drones of the rich.  Biscayne Bay yawns and burns with the city’s wicked illumination. Whores and drug-dealers own entire sections of the city.

The feeling of madness coils just under the hot sun and the roaring sea of traffic. I feel some part of me is broken by the immersion in a city this vast and impersonal. The part of me that is impacted is invisible but hurts most when I think about going home. And when I actually do visit home the smog and noise and crowds never leave my mind. I populate the olive-trees and smooth lanes of the Parasio with imagined hungry multitudes. I hear a ghost-roar of sirens, loud music, angry voices and rumbling vehicles. This is because I carry Miami with me inside wherever I go.  Two oceans pull at me with opposite tides: one a force calling me to nostalgia nd peace; the other pulling me deep into the maze of Miami, a city that has radically changed me, perhaps for the better, but certainly forever.