Ernestly Speaking

I have been thinking of this beautiful song a lot lately, here sung by the Mormon Tabernacle Choir. My high school choir sang it and I’m sure many reading this post have sung it. The song was written by a Russian refugee, Irving Berlin, who understood so well the difficult path of the weary and the beauty of hospitality. The lyrics are from the great poem by Emma Lazarus, “The New Colossus.” This is who we are to be as a nation.

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!”

Poetry has the power to rally a nation, to put words to emotions that cannot be expressed or even understood. Emma Lazarus’s words bring a clench to my heart, a sense of participating in a memory not my own: Perhaps that of my great-grandparents as a young couple bringing their several children through the port of Castle Garden in New York City, one of their children to die of typhus on the long trip by train and buggy to western Pennsylvania, or my teenaged grandfather coming through Ellis Island, viewing the newly erected Statue of Liberty and wondering what his fate would be. Now memories are being formed through videos of immigrants–many legal, some not, some even citizens–being attacked and thrown to the ground, pepper-sprayed, cuffed, demeaned, disbelieved.

We need more poetry, Emma. We need more music, Irving. Give us more words to plot the sectors of our hearts, the shocked wandering of our thoughts.

Perhaps a poem that says the opposite of what Emma gave us:
“Take from us the über-rich, the selfish,
the twisted takers yearning to defraud,
the power hungry, jaded, and the shady.
Take them and cast them in the deepest sea.
I lift my lamp in hope to breathe again.”