The Iceman

Once they said, Daddy, We don't look like
you or Mommy. We are dark and you are fair.
How can that be?
And I said, Since you ask, I'll tell you.
Actually, you are illegitimate.
And they said, What's that? What is that?
It means I'm not really your father.
It was the iceman.

Before the refrigerator, was the ice box,
and the ice man came, big and dark,
with brooding eyes and tousled locks,

Toiling up the stairways and corridors of the tenements
in the dim light of naked bulbs with flickering filaments
bearing on his shoulder the heavy block of ice
and tucked in his belt, a murderous
pick.

They called him The Greek. Women swooned.
They said, I'll take a twenty pound
piece, or forty. They said later
he had a cold shoulder.

The children weren't very old when they learned
that long before they were born, the immigrants,
the generation that was their grandparents
had lived in tenements, but not us,
and long ago came electric refrigerators
making-- in dainty parallelipipeds-- ice.

The ice man was really me, I said. And to prove it,
I said, Touch my shoulder. And they did,
and it was cold. And now remember this advice,
I said, Beware of Greeks
bearing ice.

...........................Israel Lewis