Tuesday
Until Congress passes comprehensive immigration legislation, which it hasn’t done since the Ronald Reagan administration, the United States will continue to see desperate immigrants pile up on the border and unscrupulous politicians makes racist and xenophobic appeals to their base. Increasingly we’re hearing formerly mainstream Republicans repeating white supremacist talking points about white replacement while Fox’s Tucker Carlson accuses Joe Biden of importing “non-white DNA.”
For a more enlightened perspective, check out Wisława Szymborska’s“Psalm,” which Victoria Emily Jones recently shared in her excellent blog Art and Theology. “Only what is human can truly be foreign,” the poet tells us, making the point that humans excel at finding ways to divide themselves!
Psalm
By Wislawa Szymborska
Trans. Clare Cavanagh and Stanisław Barańczak
Oh, the leaky boundaries of man-made states!
How many clouds float past them with impunity;
how much desert sand shifts from one land to another;
how many mountain pebbles tumble onto foreign soil
in provocative hops!
Need I mention every single bird that flies in the face of frontiers
or alights on the roadblock at the border?
A humble robin—still, its tail resides abroad
while its beak stays home. If that weren’t enough, it won’t stop bobbing!
Among innumerable insects, I’ll single out only the ant
between the border guard’s left and right boots
blithely ignoring the questions “Where from?” and “Where to?”
Oh, to register in detail, at a glance, the chaos
prevailing on every continent!
Isn’t that a privet on the far bank
smuggling its hundred-thousandth leaf across the river?
And who but the octopus, with impudent long arms,
would disrupt the sacred bounds of territorial waters?
And how can we talk of order overall
when the very placement of the stars
leaves us doubting just what shines for whom?
Not to speak of the fog’s reprehensible drifting!
And dust blowing all over the steppes
as if they hadn’t been partitioned!
And the voices coasting on obliging airwaves,
that conspiratorial squeaking, those indecipherable mutters!
Only what is human can truly be foreign.
The rest is mixed vegetation, subversive moles, and wind.
