Libertas

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How far would you travel to find a better life? What if the journey

took weeks under difficult conditions? If you answered, “whatever it takes,”

you echo the feelings of 12 million immigrants who passed through the now quiet halls of Ellis Island … [which] afforded them the opportunity to attain the American Dream

for themselves and their descendants.

National Parks Service, Ellis Island

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She stands alone in a New York harbor, her torch

held high and freedom’s tablet still carried on her hip;

she is now, perhaps, just a tourist attraction, a tourist trap

of glitz and glitter, for the luxury liners of old with their

lower class holds of immigrants have stopped, and Ellis

Island has shut down, a museum, a mausoleum of old stories

and history, the forgotten people but pictures on the walls.

No longer is she an Enlightenment to the World, the tired,

the poor, the huddled masses yearning, none are welcomed now,

cut off from the American Dream they longed for, all just aliens,

illegals, thieves and terrorists, rapists and drug dealers invading,

the unwelcomed, the wretched refuse of teeming shores, jailed,

deported back to the wretched conditions they escaped in leaving,

poverty and sickness, fear and danger, death, Liberty’s lamp

extinguished to them, a lamp darkened by those who have forgotten

their own immigrant roots seeking their own American Dreams, these

immigrant progeny, generations afraid of losing their own ambitions,

their goals disrupted, perhaps, by the dross of a fading Colossus,

an icon of freedom and a symbol of welcome, alone now in a New York

harbor, a lost reminder of our once hailed greatness, still calling out

to deaf ears, this mother of exiles, “send these, your homeless,

tempest-tossed, to me, I lift my lamp beside the golden door.”