Member-only story
Manhattan (a poem)
2 min readMar 19, 2021
An eighteen-year-old immigrant reaches the Port of New York in 1910
The first crossing
over the choppy gray Atlantic
was with his father
to work.
The second crossing,
they took their American money
home.
The third crossing,
the last time,
the final journey,
he sailed alone,
abandoning Greece for America’s glitter,
enchanted and
lured by sirens his father ignored.
He gambled aboard the ship
and docked without a drachma
or a penny
or the required twenty dollars.
He was officially a pauper
facing deportation.
His dream beckoned at the end of the gangplank,
drawing him off the ship.
He grabbed his opportunity,
buoyed by hope alone
and met the Greek
who’d come to America before him,
who loaned the poor
