Not My Colossus

                        After Emma Lazarus  

Not like the woman who waits in the harbor  

shining her light to welcome the masses. 

Here, on our thirsty desert borders, 

a fragmented wall of hubris clashes  

with wide open spaces, the sun and stars. 

I see— but can’t bear— man’s inhumanity, 

so turn eyes from the wall to finer affairs 

like the scorpion’s trail— calligraphy  

on the dunes— the whistling of a swallow 

coming home to her nest, cacti and bees 

exchanging sustenance, pink sky followed 

by rose dusk. Such things as these I believe  

will be and will be, while the wall lies near 

in the sand half sunk, soon to disappear.  

Published in Crab Creek Review, Spring 2022