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So Kind of Restless

At the F.D.R. Memorial
"Jah, they are so kind of restless. . . ."

That is how Joseph Langland described the wave of immigrants that came from Norway, beginning in about 1815.

It might have been that poem--"Norwegian Rivers"--
that created an urge within me to write a poem of my own
for the 50th wedding anniversary of my parents:
"Where the Winds Blow West".

Our father was one of those immigrants in that river of folk
who crossed the Atlantic like an irresistible El Nino,
like a prevailing wind, like hunger and desire,
following our mother's parents and grandparents.
Joseph Langland, himself, a native of Minnesota,
had a name that identified him and the place from where his family had come;
our parents to Washington State, into the west wind.

There is not a human being in the world, anywhere, except in Africa,
who does not live in a place to which they or their ancestors have immigrated.
The most a few of us can do--and I am not one of them--
is to claim that our forebears came a fairly long time ago;
even the first peoples to this continent arrived here only a few thousand years ago.
Some of our immigrant neighbors did not even want to come here;
they came on slave ships, and some were lured by lies and lure of a Promised Land.

Some of our neighbors, some of us, have come very recently.
Some came to be with their parents, or their children.
Some to try to earn enough to stay alive, or to send money to build a house.
Some came to walk through the same desert trails to look for the bones of their predecessors;
their family; their friends.

We are migrators, we human beings.
We have walked and sailed almost everywhere.
Our bones are in the dirt, and in the rocks; in the sea.

We know that.
We know that all of us are African by human birth,
and that we walked across Europe, and Asia, and the Americas.
We have been so kind of restless.
We look up, as Teilhard de Chardin said, at the horizon
and see ourselves coming toward us,
and it scares us.

The glory of human restlessness and curiosity scares us,
so we pretend that what we are, and what we have done
in our families, and our history, is different,
and that we were here, if not first, then at least legitimately.

We make retrospective rules,
and ask the tailors of history and legislature
to cut something to suit us,
to make us look different.

Many of us come from,
or have come away from,
a religious tradition that began
with a migration out of Egypt,
across the Red Sea, to Palestine,
where Moses and Aaron promised
there would be a land of milk and honey:
no matter that there were people already there!
They claimed the land; are still claiming the land.

We are having a hard time being honest with ourselves.

We human immigrants.
We restless ones.
We with bunks in steerage.
Walkers across the Sinai
and the Sonora.


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