3 - Autobiography: Hollywood

I
A street of strange trees
thick with small leaves; a grove of dark pines
with heavy branches thick with needles;
a sparrow that flutters to the sunny ground
unlike the brisk birds that I know.

I like the streets of New York City, where I was born,
better than these streets of palms.
No doubt, my father liked his village in Ukrainia
better than the streets of New York City;
and my grandfather the city and its synagogue,
where he once read aloud the holy books,
better than the village
in which he dickered in the market-place.

I do not know this fog,
this sun, this soil, this desert;
but the starling that at home
skips about the lawns
how jauntily it rides a palm leaf here!