Goodbye, Jersey
(inspired by Goodnight, Moon, by Margaret Wise Brown.)
The sun is high
The air is still
And everything that will be,
will.
Cars racing on the GSP
and the lady conductor asking, “tickets, please.”
Summer, trees, hydrangeas
Cool ocean breeze and jughandles
Every town in descending order,
and memories calling
from every corner
Goodbye, Jersey
Goodbye, Shore
Goodbye all the Wawa stores
Rt 35 & 36
Radio stations’ eclectic mix
Beginning in Red Bank, on the Navesink River
and traipsing around the state together,
Gingerbread houses in Ocean Grove
Twin Lights beaming from above,
Like an old, cherished love,
“You have not changed!”
(never will!)
Yet, the train moves forward, still.
Goodbye, Jersey
Goodbye, Al
Goodbye horses, farms, and cows
Goodbye ocean breeze, and salty air
and Jersey Girls everywhere.
Copyright 2012 Lupe Eyde-Tucker. All rights reserved.
Ocean Grove, NJ
I did not write ‘Goodbye, Jersey’ during NaPoWriMo 2013. I wrote it last summer after visiting New Jersey, specifically MoCo, and reconnecting with friends and places where I grew up. It was a great trip, and on the last day, as I was waiting for the train from Red Bank to take my mother and I to Newark Airport, all of the sudden the first lines of this poem just popped into my head, and I started writing it, literally on the train schedule. As we took our seats, verses and phrases kept coming to me, and I pulled out my notebook and started just writing it all out. It was a spontaneous poetic moment which I am still awed by. A couple of months later the entire state was slammed by Superstorm Sandy, and Monmouth County was devastated.
Lupita Eyde-Tucker is a bilingual poet and translator raised in New Jersey and Guayaquil, Ecuador. She is the winner of the 2021 Unbound Book Festival Emerging Poet Award, the 2019 Betty Gabehart Prize, and in 2018 was selected as an AWP Writer to Writer Mentee by poet Maggie Smith. In 2022 her poetry manuscript, "Eucalyptus," was a finalist for the Andrés Montoya Prize from Letras Latinas. The manuscript explores her Sephardic Jewish ancestry and bi-cultural heritage.
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