My grandfather thought he was a German,
dashing in his Pickelhaube, iron cross
and bullet from Verdun, until they told him,
“No, you are not one of us,”
and a clothier named Stern in North Dakota,
who didn’t know him, signed some papers,
which sailed him elsewhere, so twenty tears later
he could watch The Hunchback of Notre Dame
with me on a black and white box in the Bronx.
Quasimodo was an ugly wreck. I remember
the gap tooth, pig nose and seesaw eyes.
The townsfolk teased and menaced him.
My grandfather said, “He is one of us.”
Esmeralda was Maureen O’Hara,
who had curls, breasts and a tambourine
that could make a boy forget he was six.
Hounded as a gypsy, she was set to be hanged,
My grandfather said, “She is one of us.”
I asked, “But how do I know?”
And he said the same way Stern knew
two half-continents and an ocean away,
without a speck of ash on the hood of his car.
At which precise moment the hunchback
swung down on a rope to scoop up the gypsy,
fly her to the belfry and shout, over and over,
a solitary word,
in a splendid voice that belied his brokenness.
It’s not often that you know exactly
what a word means the first time you hear it.
Or that every time you hear it after
someone nothing like you
is sailing for your shore.