Photo by Brendon Spring on Pexels.com . Read the full text of THE NEW COLOSSUS, (partially quoted below)by Emma Lazarus and inscribed on the Statue of Liberty in New York Harbor. Today is my funeral.
I have always been myself.
everyone else was taken.
I had become a fossil.
So many layers of sediment
have built up over time
that I
am hard as rock.
Too soon
It has become
too hard
to remain human.
Especially, when monsters
roam the earth with heavy feet
in lockstep with one another.
They stand atop
the crumbling rock and pray.
They say
that they
are God’s representative
on this dying earth
to show all the way
to greater days.
We were already pretty great,I say.
I thought we were stronger than they.
I thought they could not
make me, me, me ! their prey.
Yet, on this day we celebrate my birth,
I die during parades
of those who march behind
school bands playing my songs.
A Statue of Liberty drone-scape
dots the night-time sky
above Red-White-and Boom
crowds cheering while immigrants die.
De-naturalized, de-refugeed
de-citizenized.
No irony there?
How can the crowds
not realize I am dead.
They are cheering at my funeral.
After all is said,
I am done.
Too few mourners attend.
They have been forced to hide.
Even the Fourth Estate
has crumbled before my eyes,
its voices silenced,
without enough pride nor ratings
to turn the tide of my demise.
Perhaps it is a Celebration of Life
which once was, but is no more.
Can you bring me back from the dead?
Can you resurrect what I stood for?
“Send these, the homeless,
tempest-tost to me, I lift my lamp
beside the golden door.”
You can still speak these words.
you can still act on my behalf,
on behalf of liberty itself.
This. This. This! I sincerely implore.
