HISTORY’S SHADOW

An update of a poem by the same title in my book “Immigrant Dreams.” Plus, a video of a Sir Ian McKellen performance.

Two hundred fifty years since the ink dried
on words that meant different things
to different people even then.

They come. Have always come.
Suitcases carrying what memory can’t hold alone:
a child’s laugh, the shape of a familiar street,
the weight that doesn’t have a name yet.

Before ink, before ships,
before anyone called it discovery—
nations already here.
Lenape, Cherokee, Lakota, Diné,
ten thousand years of names for every river
this country renamed after its generals.
Nobody asked them about arrival.
They learned what it costs
to be declared strangers
on land your grandmothers are buried in.

	Before the suitcases, before the willing,
	others came in the hold,
	bodies the ledgers listed as cargo.
	They cleared the land, raised the houses,
	broke open the fields, fed a country
	calling itself free
	while calling them property.
	Their descendants are still here,
	turned away at voting lines that run past closing,
	counted in cells, handed textbooks
	that give them three pages and move on.

The Irish crossed when the fields went black.
Arrived hollow. Stayed. Built.
The Italians brought basil on their hands,
the memory of sun-warm stone,
and found factory floors, hard streets,
the long way in.

This is how a country gets made.
Not once. Over   …   and   …   over.
And now they are coming again:

	Guatemalans fleeing what no one here wants to see;
	Venezuelans who lost everything before they lost the country;
	Cubans who know what it is to be disappeared;
	Afghans who stood beside our soldiers
	and got a plane ticket and a broken promise;
	Haitians who survived the gangs, the collapsed government,
	the ground that opened under their feet,
	and were told their protection here
	was temporary, as if suffering has a deadline;
	Pakistani, Lebanese, carrying children
	who don’t understand why the door
	that was open
	isn’t anymore.

The government has a word for them.
Several words. None of them accurate.
Buses in the dark. Flights with no destination
anyone will confirm.

Two hundred fifty years of this same argument:
who belongs, who decides,
whose fear gets to write the law.

	We know whose grandmothers came through Ellis Island
	speaking the ‘wrong’ language.
	We know whose grandfathers built the railroads
	and got thanked with exclusion acts.

We know who built this country
before any of them arrived,
and what it cost,
and what it bought them.

We haven’t figured out what to do with that yet.
But we know it.
We’re standing here, knowing it,
which is something.
Which has to be something.

Author’s Note

“History’s Shadows” began three years ago as an elegy for arrival. I’ve revised it now, in America’s 250th year, because elegy isn’t enough anymore.

The poem sits uneasily beside something Shakespeare wrote more than four hundred years ago in England, a speech for Sir Thomas More that the Queen’s censor banned before it could be performed. There’s an irony worth sitting with: an Englishman wrote these words, on English soil, for a country this one eventually fought to leave. That the argument he was making then belongs so completely to America now, in its 250th year of independence from that same England, says something about how old this argument actually is. And how unfinished.

Sir Ian McKellen performs it here, and it is worth every minute:

More asks the mob to imagine being cast out themselves. What country, by the nature of your error, / Should give you harbor? He calls their cruelty what it is: mountainish inhumanity. The word mountainish does something no modern word quite does. It means vast, and cold, and indifferent to whether you live.

We are not done asking that question. We haven’t been, for two hundred fifty years. The asking is, maybe, the most American thing we do.

Here is the speech:

Grant them removed, and grant that this your noise
Hath chid down all the majesty of England;
Imagine that you see the wretched strangers,
Their babies at their backs and their poor luggage,
Plodding to the ports and coasts for transportation,
And that you sit as kings in your desires,
Authority quite silenced by your brawl,
And you in ruff of your opinions clothed;
What had you got? I’ll tell you: you had taught
How insolence and strong hand should prevail,
How order should be quelled; and by this pattern
Not one of you should live an aged man,
For other ruffians, as their fancies wrought,
With self same hand, self reason, and self right,
Would shark on you, and men like ravenous fishes
Feed on one another.…

You’ll put down strangers,
Kill them, cut their throats, possess their houses,
And lead the majesty of law in lyam
To slip him like a hound. Alas, alas, say now the King,
As he is clement if th’offender mourn,
Should so much come too short of your great trespass
As but to banish you: whither would you go?
What country, by the nature of your error,
Should give you harbor? Go you to France or Flanders,
To any German province, to Spain or Portugal,
Nay, anywhere that not adheres to England,
Why, you must needs be strangers. Would you be pleas’d
To find a nation of such barbarous temper
That breaking out in hideous violence
Would not afford you an abode on earth.
Whet their detested knives against your throats,
Spurn you like dogs, and like as if that God
Owned not nor made not you, nor that the elements
Were not all appropriate to your comforts,
But charter’d unto them? What would you think
To be thus used? This is the strangers’ case
And this your mountainish inhumanity.

Upcoming…

• A prose poem about memory:

  IMMORTALITY, 11 July 2026

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