Swedish blacksmith, and a poem

[JHCC]

My friend Rob Hardy is the Poet Laureate of Northfield, MN. With his permission, I am sharing a photo and a poem he shared earlier today on Facebook.

"Here's my great-grandfather, Andrew Peter Atterberg, outside his blacksmith shop, pretending to shoe a child's hobby horse. My great-grandfather arrived in the United States from Sweden in 1884. Without immigrants, I would not be here."

He arrived in New York Harbor
a year before the Statue of Liberty.
It was 1884, a year of bank bailouts.
He found work on the docks, 
a room in an immigrant hotel
where recruiters came to hire homesick 
men to work the fields on little upstate farms.
He was born in a city of shipbuilders
and ended up behind the plow amid
Cayuga’s landlocked hills. 
He came across the ocean to end
his days on a few acres of glacial till,
a piece of America he could call his own.
We all grow our stories 
in ground prepared by someone else.