I never noticed a sound in my childhood room in Philadelphia,
not the horn-blaring, teenage screaming, razzle-dazzle nighttime streets of Philadelphia.
I slept deeply in my fourth-floor apartment, at the rim of the Locust Street canyon in my city,
cocooned in the swell of motion, swarm of humanity, mellifluous cacophony of Philadelphia.
My grandfather taught me gingkoes and sycamores by bark and by leaf, his witty
sayings seeding the soil of the square, sprouting my love of the natural world and Philadelphia.
The riverbank was a land of cobblestone and brick, jagged sidewalks, broken curbs—a pity
for the old forest woods, marsh, and wide sky the settlers slashed for Philadelphia.
Pig pens, brickyards, a film of glass and lead turned the country towne gritty.
I remember finger falls on black windowsills, refinery dust between my toes in Philadelphia.
I grew up on a substrate of steel and stone, not sunsets and mountain ranges, an unwitting
sheltered place, the 2-mile radius of my life. I didn’t know what I was missing in Philadelphia.
I ask my mother (who lives alone and doesn’t drive) if she feels cooped up in the small city.
She says, “There is no place I want to live that’s better than my neighbourhood in Philadelphia.”
My parents named me Susan, the dog’s name was Love. Like an eagle, I imprinted on the city.
But then I flew, birthed into the clear morning of the world by my first love, Philadelphia.
Note
This poem first appeared, in a slightly different form, in Beltway Poetry Quarterly, Winter 2023.