And now another gem from TMV’s favorite artist of verse, Michael Silverstein, aka Wall Street Poet:
A poem by Emma Lazarus, “The New Colossus” is inscribed on the base of the Statue of Liberty. Its last lines read:
“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!”
But heck. These days, who wants to build a better country with riff-raff like this?
The immigration bill now before Congress has provisions that are a lot more au courrant.
So perhaps its time we make a few adjustments to the final lines of Emma’s little poem. How about this as a closer:
I’ll take your best, the rest ignore,
Their yearnings are of no concern to me,
I’ve had my fill of wretched poor,
They’ll look elsewhere when they’ve a need to flee,
My lamp’s gone dark, I’ll take no more!
©2007 Michael Silverstein
Joe Gandelman is a former fulltime journalist who freelanced in India, Spain, Bangladesh and Cypress writing for publications such as the Christian Science Monitor and Newsweek. He also did radio reports from Madrid for NPR’s All Things Considered. He has worked on two U.S. newspapers and quit the news biz in 1990 to go into entertainment. He also has written for The Week and several online publications, did a column for Cagle Cartoons Syndicate and has appeared on CNN.