Richard Wilbur (1921-2017) was not primarily a political poet, but his work is dotted with words that seem to speak very directly to us today, even when written many years ago:
. . . Praise to this land for our power to change it,
To confess our misdoings, to mend what we can,
To learn what we mean and to make it the law,
To become what we said we were going to be.
Praise to our peoples, who came as strangers,
Who more and more have been shaped into one
Like a great statue brought over in pieces,
Its hammered copper bolted together,
Anchored by rods in the continent’s rock,
With a core of iron, and a torch atop it. . . . .
Not that the graves of our dead are quiet,
Nor justice done, nor our journey over.
We are immigrants still, who travel in time,
Bound where the thought of America beckons;
But we hold our course, and the wind is with us.
From “Like a Great Statue”, Part III of “On Freedom’s Ground:
A Cantata” (premiered by composer William Schuman in 1986 on the one-hundredth anniversary of the dedication of the Statue of Liberty).
