Many among us recall early school days when we read The New Collosus, the poem by Emma Lazarus now enshrined at the Statue of Liberty on the islet in New York City harbor. Some of us were required to memorize it, but even if not, we all recognize the last lines of her sonnet: 

"… Give me your tired, your poor,
Your huddled masses yearning to breathe free,
The wretched refuse of your teeming shore.

Send these, the homeless, tempest-tost to me,
I lift my lamp beside the golden door!"

These days, we may read her poem and wonder how we have fallen so far from her ideal, her vision. My grandparents saw the Mother of Exiles when they landed in this country over a hundred years ago, their hearts full of hope and not without reason. The country was not perfect and not everyone was equally welcome, but the poem expressed a profound aspiration, which is why schools taught it to their children, and why we remember it.

But now, we live in a harsh and terrible contrast to her time, and Lazarus would not recognize this land, where, I like too think, at least half the voters still believe in world-wide welcome, but now the other half celebrates cruelty.

Reflecting on all this, I wrote the lines below. (A note: the words in italics are borrowed from her poem, and the rhyme is Elizabethan instead of her Petrarchan.)

To Emma, With Regrets

So long beneath the air-bridged harbor’s sky, 
A mighty woman lit our golden door,
To greet the world’s less fortunate and cry,
To all, “Give me your tired and your poor!”

The Lazarus lines set down so long ago,
Recall a country from a better age;
When refugees in crowded ships below,
Were met with help and kindness, not with rage.

The homeless, tempest-tossed once welcome here,
Now find themselves to foreign prisons shipped;
And those yet free must spend their days in fear,
Their children from their mothers cruelly ripped.

No, freedom’s flame’s gone out and justice fled,
The world now knows… America is dead!

May 16, 2025