Give me your filthy
rich, your perfectly spaced apart
in manageable intervals
with proper documentation
yearning to breathe currency,
because currency is all we’ll have
once we befoul the air and ocean
that brought you here; you and all
the others obsessed with green
threads woven into paper
adulterated by special technology.
When you breathe in currency
you are living a certain dream,
possibly American
and possibly dedicated to a theory
about the worth of things like
invisible hands and voting with
your feet; or the one about
evil and idle appendages and from
the cloven hoof, those who
refuse to eat its meat; or
the consequences of living
hand to mouth and who gets hoof
and mouth disease; and of course
the separation of races and peoples,
which is how you want it, isn’t it?
Why come all this way only to be confronted
by the thing you hate, other people
and your own worst tendencies?
Extinguish the light without cursing
the dark and see how that works out
for you, you speakers of English and highly
educated; you of the conquering
limbs with no more land to stride,
silenced by the homeless you abhor
but cannot avoid.
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White House Policy advisor downplays Statue of Liberty’s famous poem [CNN]
Jane Rosenberg LaForge is a poet, essayist and fiction writer living in New York City. Her most recent collection of poems is “Daphne and Her Discontents” (Ravenna Press 2017) and her forthcoming novel is “The Hawkman: A Fairy Tale of the Great War,” from Amberjack Publishing.
Photo by Tobi Oluremi.
