In The New York Statue Of Liberty

Melech Ravitch, born in Eastern Europe in 1893, emigrated to the New World at the beginning of the century. On his way to Ellis Island, where new immigrants disembarked, he passed the Statue of Liberty. Years later, he composed this poem about its meaning and promise.

In the New York Statue of Liberty

I am a man of blood, flesh and bone.
My soul is love, laughter and tears.
And you? Woman, hollow, steel giant
With the torch in your right hand high,
You are a golden woman, with a tinny skin
Taut over a steel skeleton.
Your tin lips have never kissed bread.
Your iron ribs have never cradled a man in bed.
And…..I love you with your young love, flaming and tender.
Thirty years of my youth, and manhood I yearned,
For your first glance pined.

I am a poet and a wanderer and a Jew.
The steps to my soul are trembling strophes of my verse.
And to yours—which is only one of millions of heads—
To your head and thought, hundreds of stairs of iron.
Empty is your soul: winter—cold, summer—hot, as in any edifice of tin.

And yet this is so enormous and so wonderful
In your soul, with hundreds of others on stairs to wander and tire
And sing in oneself a glowing, warmly human love song
To you! That in your veins of wire and of steel
Flow electric lights, instead of living blood
While you are golem only, monument of Liberty, symbol…
And while you are golem, symbol, Liberty’s monument.
I’m writing this song in love and youthful excitement. My hand trembles,
Sparkle the eyes, burns the blood.
Believe me, lady, when I pressed my lips to your tin walls
And to the walls of your proud neck and—hidden—secretly kissed them,
That no one should see and say maybe, a poet insane perhaps.
This was the love of purest spirit.
Like a love song—this pitifully sincere song;
While never did I so love,
Never, any woman so
As the Liberty that to you once and for all
Was granted the right the symbol to be.

Your torch is directed
To New York, but your light burns
To all the ends of the world.
One blesses and one curses you,
One honors and another hates,
One is earnest, another frivolous.
And I have purely love and faith
For curse and hatred are wind, sawdust.

Oh, is it true, you woman, you freedom, you’re today a fallen woman,
And perhaps—perhaps because of that is my love for you so tender and so deep.
In your tin belly, you tin symbol,
Are you pregnant with the new savior of the worlds.
They may laugh at you, they may curse you—
You, only you, will bear him in light and in faith.
On your hands will you him—your son—
Like the torch above, raise high over all mankind.

And laugh will he who now weeps.
And weep he who curses.
Now.
United.
Led by a child.
Liberty, beloved, yours, only yours, only your son
Will be the savior of the world.
A son of the spirit of all in love with you!

Oh, also shall the breath of this love song, in love to you conceived,
Be then a part of the spirit that impregnated you.

I loved this poem.