what burns….*
i don’t know why the words come to me, but here they are…
“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!”
This excerpt from the poem by Ezra Lazarus titled “The New Colossus,” I learned as a song in elementary school. I remember sitting at my desk with the little hardbound music book open to the page. I can see the green Statue of Liberty in profile alongside the treble staff marked with the simple notes of melody. The way we sang it, the song sounded like a durge. It was not a happy song. The mournful tune was one that weighed me down. My education had not yet broadened my horizons to famines and hopelessness. My empathy had only budded for roly polys smashed by feet and bad little boys and girls who didn’t get gifts from Santa. So ignorant was I to the dramas brought upon humankind. Even my Swedish ancestors were nameless, faceless ones who had come through Ellis Island as flat characters untouched by life’s offenses.
I loved that song…have held it in my heart for half a century now. Have never forgotten the monotonal beginning, the lifted crescendo of the end. And today I sing it, not for yesterday, but for today. For whatever might welcome those thousands in LA whose lives have been burned, branded by a raging acceleration of uncertainty, devastations, massive and monumental, creatures and treasures vanished, the landscape bearing more loss than an imagination can hold.
may the days lighten with the help of our faraway star, may the nights soften with rain, may the skies clear and the hearts calm and may all that is needed arrive and all that can never be repaired join in some weary dance where resignation joins hands with renewal when time sees fit for that grace. may mercy travel with the thousands of responders, those stretching beyond themselves to care for others, and may the power of story strengthen the fabric of all that is inflammable as the myth of permanence cowers in the face of what is.
may the words of Ezra Lazarus live this day as a torch not of destruction but of hope.
