Amy Gordon
Lady, You’re Such a Beautiful!
I saw the Statue of Liberty. And I said to myself, Lady, you’re such a beautiful! You opened your arms and you get all the foreigners here. Give me a chance to prove
that I am worth it, to do something, to be someone in America.
—Greek immigrant.
Brooklyn Bridge
a rare warm day in March 2017
Bicyclists trill their bells
race through the maze of tourists taking selfies
Liberty
stands across the harbor holding up her torch
beside a gang of cranes
red-orange sky behind the scene
Imagine for a moment
percolating archetypes in 1865:
robust half-naked women
Britannia of Britain Marianne of France
& then came Libertas goddess
worshipped by emancipated slaves
in ancient Rome Bartholdi sculptor
clothed Liberty in classic robes
intended her to wear
the pileus
emblematic cap of liberty and freedom
No said the warriors
of our defeated South
no
and Bartholdi chose
a crown instead
seven rays to form an aureole
to light the seven seas &
seven continents He meant
her to hold a broken chain
another metaphor
he never dared to execute A broken shackle
& a chain lie instead at Liberty’s right foot reappear
before the left one
half-hidden by her robes Difficult to see
Gustave Eiffel engineer forged an iron truss
to hold her skin It’s thin
made of copper sheets Once a dun
dull copper color she’s grown weathered by salt
& sun. She glows with verdigris
People say they like her green It softens her
Give me your tired your poor
Your huddled masses
yearning to breathe free
wrote Emma Lazarus She aided Jews
who fled the massacres
among them my great-grandparents
& their five daughters who sailed
four suitcases between them all
past Liberty
carrying my genes
here to the city of New York
Twelve-year-olds in camps dubbed “jungles”
call home on cell phones
to Syria
to tell their mothers who remain
in bombed-out
cities not to worry they are fine
Throngs of people walk both ways to cross the bridge
A gull flies over waves
wheels close to Liberty to bring her news
They’re not he calls
They’re not he cries
They’re notletting them in
Amy Gordon is the author of numerous books for young readers, including When JFK Was My Father (Houghton Mifflin, 1999) and Painting the Rainbow (Holiday House, 2014), both works of historical fiction haunted by helpful ghosts. Her poems have appeared in The Massachusetts Review, Aurorean, Plum, and the anthology Transition: Poems of the Aftermath (Indolent Books, forthcoming).
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