Pilgrim II

By: Victoria Smith

The certificate arrived in the mail.
I’m now a child of Uncle Sam.
Many years of toil culminate in this:
the remains of dead trees.
I look at the badge of my new allegiance,
feeling strange lack for my betrayal.
I ask myself what
this paper has given.
The answer eludes me:
the ultimate irony.
Surely not freedom: it comes
with a price in this land;
Surely not equality: it applies
mostly to white men;
Surely not social security: there’s
hardly any, nowadays;
Surely not safety: these are dangerous
times for the U S of A;
Surely not the American Dream: many are
trapped in its nightmares;
And surely not the surety
of keeping my beloved:
sometimes, love is not enough.
What, then, did I sacrifice loyalties for:
foregoing with patriotic schemes
in leaving the Motherland—and
with her, my childhood dreams?
What life have I bartered for hard
earned vocation forsaken?
What joys of the heart gained
in place of family abandoned?
Tell me, Uncle Sam.
For I’m the same as before:
No freer: true liberty comes
from freedom of the mind;
No more equal to any man: equality comes
from the human soul;
No more secure: this is the gift
of faith and hope;
No more the dreamer: my dreams transcend
political boundaries;
No less vulnerable to love’s loss: Love, alas,
is its own master—it comes
and goes as it pleases.
I’m a traveler in search of new frontiers,
and find:
The only ones left are those
in my mind.
Why bother with outer space?
Capitalism’s generals have rocketlaunched
its schisms.
I wonder if anti-globalists see
their fight is quite obsolete?
And now, what’s this?
To spread democratic bliss?
Don’t you know you can’t make people
free, unless with their own
blood, they pay for it?
One of your sons said not to ask
what this country can do for us, but
what we can do for this country.
That was nice,
back then.
But today we say:
No more to human sacrifice
before altars of corporate gods and states!
No more to paying the king’s ransom;
ransom, rather, the people’s fate!
And oh, by the way,
I don’t mean it in the way
totalitarian Communism does.
Nor even Fascism, disguised
as moralism.
Nor radical religiosity—
that dark den of bigotry.
For they too have bared
their ugly heads to us:
They’re as frightful as
the monsters they seek to oust!
Call me left wing, right wing, reactionary—
as you please.
But I call the shots here—
here, in my mind.
I don’t have to submit
to an ideologue’s world.
Truth is: Peoples are real;
states are not.
Human life, priceless;
greed, insatiable.
Geographical lines are contrived
walls against our failure
to hug humanity as one.
So we continue to walk
the earth as wandering
strangers, never arriving home.
Nonetheless, I am
grateful, Uncle Sam:
For you’re one place in the world
I can say these things,
and still keep my head!
For better or worse, you are now
my home; and your
people—mine, too.
Though I first came to you for love
of a man, now I stay for love
of mankind.
In this fight for elusive dreams,
this arena, I guess, is
as good as it gets.
I may sound apologetic, yes,
but I tell you I will not rest,
till your borders will divest
themselves of old precincts,
and you truly become—
Land of the Free!

Poet’s Notes. I wrote above poem sixteen years ago, soon after I became a U.S. citizen. It’s eerie to me, after re-reading it, to feel that it could have been written today, relevant as it is for the America we currently live in as it was back then. The poem speaks for itself, as well as it speaks for the immigrant American in me. (All rights reserved. Copyright © 2017 by Victoria G. Smith. For updates on her author events & publications, go to VictoriaGSmith. com. “Like” her on Facebook at Author Victoria G. Smith. “Follow” her on Twitter @AuthorVGSmith)