Charlotte 2, or Another Poem from iWPS: Poem-a-day #346

The housekeeper at my hotel room door
is trying to tell me something.
She points to my unmade bed,
the freshly stacked towels,
says she is sorry the sheets
are still pulled back and rumpled.
I start to tell her it's okay, no problem,
de nada, when the Albanian poet
speaks up:
she's saying she didn't make your bed
because you left your pajamas on it,
and she won't touch your personal things.
And now, translation's grateful wake of smiles
passes through the room, and I tell
the housekeeper not to worry.
As the door closes, the Albanian rocks
her baby close, and explains
I speak immigrant.
I do, too. But I speak the kind
of a man with a foreign engineering degree
pacing Manhattan with the kind of hunger
it takes to feed a family.
It's true, sometimes, what they say
about our own kind.
Another Jew hired him, took a chance
on the greenhorn, saw him
through his night school master's degree.
The humble language of service,
of people's rumpled and unwashed selves,
is one I was never expected to learn;
my door, a threshold
of Babel.