I live in Minneapolis, chilly Minneapolis.
Most of you know about Garrison Keillor, right?
And Land of Lake Wobegon where all the men are stronger,
you know?
Blah, blah, blah.
OK, and people have this image of Minnesota, which really
doesn't conform, certainly Minneapolis,
conform to the state.
I mean, Chris Rock in his routine
says, Minnesota, the only Black people
there are Prince and Kevin Garnett, when
in actuality 80% of the kids in the Minneapolis school system
are kids of color.
We have the second largest Muslim population
in the country, and as I say in the first line of this poem
there are 150 first languages in the public schools.
In the schools my kids go to there
are 35 first languages in their grade school,
so this is just a poem about the school that my kids go to.
It's called "Minneapolis Public".
There are 150 first languages in our schools,
and so many aliens even ET would go unnoticed.
Though if your tongue moved one way in the land of your birth,
it must move another now, awkward at first.
There are Blacks here who've never
been to Africa, Africans who've never heard a Baptist prayer,
much less the solemn dirges of Lutherans
or how the artist formerly known is some sort of Prince.
In the Anthology of American Buddhist Poetry,
you will find not one face of a Tibetan,
but they are here with girls and boys named Tenzin,
and one, my son's good friend, throws a hard, mean spiral.
Esmir is not the name of a girl, but a Bosnian boy
who crouches at a table and glues
the lamp together, and later with my other son,
conspires on a book, A Touch of Rabies:
A Heartbreaking Tale of Good Dogs Gone Bad.
Why tell a soul of the sieges that brought him here?
Or stories of the Dalai Lama or of the temples destroyed
or troops of the warlords in the streets of Somalia,
the borders dividing death from safety, if not evil from good.
Say you're Egyptian or Haitian.
Here you're singular, not part of a Big Apple ghetto.
If you're Chinese most likely you're adopted
or else your parents studied engineering at the U. Have
I mentioned the Mexicans?
In West Side Story, the rumble starts
with Puerto Ricans and working class whites in a high school
gym.
This year Maria is still Natalie Wood
white to Jamaica's half-Black Anita, and the Jets
sport Blacks, one Tibetan, and my happa daughter
who still doesn't question such casting
or why Bye, Bye Birdie last year just might not
be the choice of half the school for a song
and dance they could take on as their own.
Still at the school spring dance,
J.Lo and Ja Rule set the awkward bump and grind
of junior high girls, and the boys watch on the sidelines
as boys that age do, whether Bosnian, Black, white, Somali,
or Tibetan.
I'm told we live in the land of Great Lake Wobegon
where all the women are strong, the men are good looking,
and the children are above average,
and I always add everyone's white.
Hey Tenzin, Nabil, go tell Garrison: Not now.
Not quite.