artwork: ralph murre
An Immodest Proposal
by Martha
Kaplan
Let us now
fire all immigrants
Too many work
to prepare the food we eat
To slaughter
the meat
To truck the
meat to market
To harvest in
the fields from dark to dark
Too many slave
in conditions we choose not to see
Let us now
fire them all
And feed
ourselves the sludge and slime that we create
Let us free
the rivers that we have dammed until no
Rivers flow below
our borders
Too many work
for wages far below our own
Or none, to
build our ticky-tack houses from sun to sun
Our
skyscrapers high on desert floors
To trim our
elegant trees, or clean our floors, bent
Knees before
our un-flushed latrines
Too many kiss
and hug, and feed and comfort,
Our offspring
in schools too dear for them to afford,
And let us
fire all those who have finished soldiering
For us in all
our foreign wars
Let us now
fire all immigrants
Let us also
send back those children of immigrants
Born here
among us, though citizens, they clearly do not
Belong, their
languages too melodic to the ear,
Their food too
varied, too unlike the meatloaf of cows
Raised on evil
corn, the night-Trojan horse,
Eater of
prairie soil, let us send back all who come
Without
influence and power to this blood soil,
These high
mountains, our ocean shores, and let us
Extend this
principle of exclusion
To all the
generations of those who have come
from
outside these borders,
To those whose
children ate the trees
extending
from sea to sea,
And blew away
the twelve feet deep soil, the work
of
millennia,
And who sing of
purple mountains beautiful
And golden
waves of grass as if the few
Hundred years
of residency despoiling this place
grants
them grace
Send them back
across the seas,
Give back the
land to those here first,
Those these
newcomers call “new,” and I too
Will wave from
the boat sending me back
To the killing
fields of Europe
~ first
published in Mobius, The Poetry Magazine
