He stacked apples with hands
that once held a passport stamped in Cyrillic,
shouted prices in half-English,
half-hope.
The cobblestones slick with morning,
the air thick with onion skin and ambition,
he made a living from the ground up—
literally, fruit by fruit,
thumb pressing each pear
as if testing its readiness to survive here.
Haymarket wasn’t a market
so much as a proving ground,
where men sold what they could
to buy a life
they couldn't yet name.
He taught his son to count change
before he could count in English,
taught him that every sale
was a kind of prayer.
No plaques. No headlines.
Just the memory of oranges in a basket,
a cold morning,
and the way he stood straighter
when someone called him “sir.”