Best Immigrants Poems

This poem was written after I took a tour of the Little Bighorn Battlefield National Monument in Wyoming, the site of Custer's Last Stand.

It was the year eighteen sixty-eight.
The U.S. government signed the Fort Laramie Treaty.
The Black Hills were to be closed to white settlements,
Preserved...

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I came first but you did not write me in history
You made me mute, invisible, estranged
From my own heredity and great memory
With the slivering tongue arranged 
Upon my brain. You brought me back, later
Across the wet desert of the Atlantic 
From coffle to cotton, without...

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There has been such a backlash against immigrants
that I decided I would put out a thought.  
Do we remember the immigrants
Who for our country fought?

Starting with our revolution
when this country was born in 1776.
There were immigrants who fought by our side
Von Steuben, Kosciuszko, and...

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At the national picket of the unhappy
I see large crooked coins
Hoisted like placards above the irate crowd.
On the first face, I see immigrants & owls embossed,
And on the second, snakes & neighbors.
It's the coin they toss
To divine the wellspring of troubles
That every day beset this...

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In 1920, my father, 16, was a guest of the British government. He was a prisoner of their forces occupying Ireland at the time, a group called the Black and Tans.

One day he and seven other prisoners were brought out of their makeshift cells to...

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Made it in at 10 A.M. 
to 
see 
immigrants who want 
   to become 
working Americans 
Only a lowly college assistant 
  yet I have 
my share of students 
They come from Israel, Bangladesh, Russia, the D.R. and other places 
 ...

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I suppose it isn't rather nice
to think of us this way,
but to the squirrels
and the trees,
the robins and the grasses,
human natures are Earth's great transitioning immigrants
on this block
we call a planet.

In this newest arrival sense,
I hope and fear
we are Earth's greatest immigrant yield,
pushing transitional boundaries
toward...

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Yes, this is a bad joke
Yes, this is a sad comedy
What an irony
What a parody
Smile and smirk, so you won’t be poked
What a hilarious lie! It is a travesty
Immigrants don’t eat pets
They eat beef, chicken, and pork
Like you and me. All bets
Are off. Let’s be...

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A new immigrant now comes:
I see him on our streets,
I see him on the factory floor,
I see him at an old friend's desk--
How I would that there he would stop!
But robots they are: neither modesty nor empathy
they know.

He doesn't look like us
And won't speak our...

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To rent a room, do you know how much I pay
Without social security and bank statement
It is more than I earn for cutting grass and hay
More than can build a new apartment
For this one is broken down
The cockroaches crawl night and day
The ceiling too is...

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I am sitting here 
    in the ESL lab where 
the great mass of immigrants 
     need help because they are 
new to our shores 
   Immigrants work hard 
And when I see them I am...

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The somber white cats,
Creeping up the sharp blue fence-
                    Their blood thirst- for wealth....

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WHAT A WONDERFUL WORLD

Shadows of leaves against migrants stripped of bark

Children hidden against a darkened sky
A cup of river foaming at the mouth

Suited men and women laced swirl about with noxious airs
Walk blindly into an imaginary sun longtime set

Sink into the plastic remnants of bottles...

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In my country, gangs of fiends own the night.
In my country, we lived broken lives of torment.
My family fled with little but our naked terror.
Bleeding and blistered, our feet carried us hundreds of miles.
But I always had my familia. 

We migrated in trucks, never sure
we...

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Americans are a mixture of flavors:
Salty, spicy, sweet.
Whatever you like,
your taste we meet.

Descendants of countries
far and wide.
Wherever they once lived
they came here to hide.

Hiding from violence and hate,
from poverty and war, 
immigrants seeking a new fate.

They were black, brown and white,
short and tall,
fat and slim,
we...

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