July 5: Jubilee Time, Lisel Mueller, "Your Tired, Your Poor," New Cartoon

Early summer days are a jubilee time for birds.  In the fields, around the house, in the barn, in the woods, in the swamp--everywhere love and songs and nests and eggs.  From the edge of the woods, the white-throated sparrow (which must come all the way from Boston) calls, "Oh, Peabody, Peabody, Peabody!"  On an apple bough, the phoebe teeters and wags its tail and says, "Phoebe, phoe-bee!"  The son sparrow, who knows how brief and lovely life is, says, "Sweet, sweet, sweet interlude, sweet, sweet, sweet interlude."  If you enter the barn, the swallows swoop down from their nests and scold.  "Cheeky, cheeky!" they say.

This paragraph captures summer in all its glory.  Birds and fields and woods.  When I step outside in the morning, I stand there for a moment, listening to the birds in the morning sun.  It's a small moment of beauty to begin my day.  A moment of total freedom to enjoy all the blessings of my life.

It is Independence Day weekend.  A time to celebrate all the freedoms Americans enjoy each and every day.  In the news recently, however, some Americans have been doing something in Murrieta, California, that sort of makes me ashamed to call myself a United States citizen.  A group of Murrieta residents have banded together to block the unloading of buses filled with illegal immigrants.  These immigrants consist mainly of women and young children who have fled from situations of violence, poverty, and desperation.

The news reports I've seen are really horrible, full of some of the worst xenophobic rants I've heard since viewing a documentary about Adolf Hitler in high school.  These so-called red-blooded Americans seem to forget that, if it weren't for immigrants, the United States of America would not exist.  This pilgrims came to Plymouth Rock because they were fleeing religious persecution in their homeland.  Wave after wave of people came to our shores to escape things like famines, dictators, poverty, pogroms.  They were all looking for a better life for themselves and their children.

The citizens of Murrieta are no doubt familiar with the Statue of Liberty (given to the United States by France, by the way).  They seem to have forgotten the words engraved on its bronze plaque:  "...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 / Give me your tired, your poor, your tired, poor. / I lift my lamp up."

Tonight's poem by Lisel Mueller seems an appropriate choice for this weekend.  I'm praying for those busloads of homeless, tempest-tost women and children tonight.

Saint Marty also prays those people in Murreita remember compassion, charity, and love.

Your Tired, Your Poor

by:  Lisel Mueller

1  ASYLUM 

"I cannot ask you to paint the tops
of your bare mountains green
or gentle your coasts to lessen
my homesickness.  Beggar, not chooser,
I hand you the life you say I must leave
at the border, bundled and tied.
You riffle through it without looking,
stamp it and put it out the back
for the trash collector.  'Next,' you call.

"I am free.  I stand in the desert,
heavy with what I smuggled in
behind my eyes and under my tongue:
memory and language, my rod and staff,
my leper's rattle, my yellow star."

2  ENGLISH AS A SECOND LANGUAGE

The underpaid you teacher
prints the letters t, r, e, e
on the blackboard and imagines
forests and gardens springing up
in the tired heads of her students.

But they see only four letters:
a vertical beam weighed down
by a crushing crossbar
followed by a hook,
and after the hook, two squiggles,
arcane identical twins
which could be spying eyes
or ready fists, could be handles,
could be curled seedlings, could take root,
could develop leaves.

3  CROSSING OVER

There comes a day when the trees
refuse to let you pass
until you name them.  Stones
speak up and reveal themselves
as the poor of your new country.
Then you see that the moon
has chosen to follow you here
and find yourself humming the music
you stuffed your ears against.
You dream in rhyme, in a language
you never wanted to understand.
When you pick up the telephone,
the voices from home arrive
sighing, bent by the ocean.
Their letters bear postage stamps
that surprise you with their strange, bright birds.

Confessions of Saint Marty