Flowers For Socrates

by NONA BLYTH CLOUD

ONCE UPON A TIME, in a country so big that it stretched for many miles, all the way between two oceans, a woman wrote a poem. This poem was put in the base of a statue that became very famous because it was the first thing that people saw when they came on ships to the biggest city in the big country.

Year after year, people who were poor, or had lost their homes because neighbors were fighting neighbors in the country where they were born, wanted to come to the big country. Sometimes, the mean people in the big country wouldn’t let them in, but other times, the kind people remembered the words in the statue, and welcomed the people who needed help or a new place to call home.

You see, even though the big country was very big, and had lots of room, and lots of food and money, it was still like the other countries. Because anywhere you go, there will be mean people and kind people, and mean things happen when the mean people are running a country, and kind things happen when the kind people run it.

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Forgive me for starting this week’s Word Cloud as a fable for little children. Thinking about little children is keeping me up at night, and the famous words enshrined at the Statue of Liberty are very much on my mind.

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Emma Lazarus (1849-1887) wrote The New Colossus, the poem which contains the lines so often quoted when immigration is talked about in America. She was born in New York City on July 22 in 1849, the year that outgoing U.S. President James K. Polk became the first president to have his photograph taken while in office, incoming President Zachary Taylor refused to take his oath of office on a Sunday, and thousands of ‘49ers’ were joining the California Gold Rush.

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Most people only know the last lines, but here is the whole sonnet Emma Lazarus wrote:

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!”

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