Shut Down

January 22, 2018

The Statue of Liberty
Is closed. Everyone is to blame
The other

The mall is closed too
The downtown the cobbler
The hardware store

They’re all gone, the stuff
We still need to fix
The center, the hard ware

Of function, it’s broke

In neighborhoods of San Francisco
In Brooklyn, Somerville, Rutland,
places where the poor, the immigrant nested

Aren’t you so tired?

The mailwoman is working
For free this week
They explained that on the news

As the flu and the hackers
And the weather that just makes you weep
And the homes that burned and washed away

While the dog howled and women marched
And day moved quietly toward night
Lady Liberty’s torch was extinguished.


READ MORE
The Statue of Liberty went dark overnight and the timing was just ‘too perfect’ [Washington Post]


Yvonne Daley is a career journalist and aging hippie who returned to poetry for sanity in these difficult times. She lives in Vermont, still a sane place.

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