Upsoaring wings: Mother of Exiles

This is the nightmare a deluded electorate put us into in November of 2018: last week the defective-in-every-way occupant of the White House declared that the United States of America is full, and there’s no room for anyone else here, okay? (Unless you’re white, in the market for grotesquely overpriced condos, or extremely hot and not too particular about whom you shtup.)

(It was also a week in which Mr. Stable Genius declared that asylum seekers aren’t human, but animals, averred that his Bronx-born father was born “in a wonderful part of Germany” and informed us that the sound of windmills gives you cancer. And his goober followers swallowed it all. I absolutely despair.)

So here’s your daily reminder to tell that despicable cockroach husk, “Fuck you, and the slobbering, gap-toothed, meth-addled, knuckle-dragging, tobacco-stained, 'clean coal' believing, sister-shagging, hypocritical cretins you rode in on.

Yes—today’s entry for National Poetry Month is by Emma Lazarus, descendant of Sephardic Jews who arrived in New York when it was Nieuw Amsterdam, and therefore antedate any of the Ozymandias of Queens' claim to citizenship (his going only back to his grandfather Friedrich, who fled Bavaria to avoid mandatory military service—cool how that became a family tradition, eh—and established the family money through prostitution). Lazarus began writing as an early teen; her first published collection of poetry and translations was praised by no less a practitioner than William Cullen Bryant.

In 1883, Lazarus was asked to write something to be auctioned in aid of raising money for a pedestal for Liberty Enlightening the World, created by French sculptor Frédéric Auguste Bartholdi; the one we know as the Statue of Liberty. She declined at first, but relented and wrote a sonnet called “The New Colossus”.

The lines that have since come to embody everything the United States was meant to be weren’t added to the statue until 1901, a decade and a half after Lazarus died aged 38. But they are now so inextricably associated with Lady Liberty that it’s hard to think of the statue without them.

The poem also refutes and condemns everything the current administration and its Repug enablers are trying to do, so it’s good to be reminded of it.

“The New Colossus”

Not like the brazen giant of Greek fame,

With conquering limbs astride from land to land;

Here at our sea-washed, sunset gates shall stand

A mighty woman with a torch, whose flame

Is the imprisoned lightning, and her name

Mother of Exiles. From her beacon-hand

Glows world-wide welcome; her mild eyes command

The air-bridged harbor that twin cities frame.

“Keep, ancient lands, your storied pomp!” cries she

With silent lips. “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!”

Man, those were the days, eh? “Our country is full,” my Irish-American ass. Which anyone espousing that utter claptrap is free to kiss at any time.