Scratch the paint off most Americans and you’ll find an immigrant underneath

“America is the idea that America is an embrace”

^{Theresa Bernstein, The Immigrants (1923)}

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Dear reader,

Bob is one of those writers who gets up everyday at 4 am and write for the first couple of hours. He’s written over 15 thousand poems in his lifetime, is my estimation — the number is probably higher. And as you can imagine, I’m very excited and honored to have access to these poems, and often get to be the first reader for them.

Here’s one that’s very relevant now, especially in America, but also globally as the anti-immigrant sentiment rises in the hearts of people who think they own the land they occupy.

May the hearts of people in power be governed by love,

Karan

Scratch the paint off most Americans and you’ll find an immigrant underneath

by Bob Hicok

The people who made
the people who made
the people who made
the people who made me, etc.,
came here on a boat, wearing shoes and hats.
I mean the people, not the boat.
Though the sky itself is a hat,
and it's better to walk the earth
without shoes, in bare feet
so you can listen to the dirt
speak of sun and rain, of wheat and corn
and the past. People come here from all over,
which is a place and direction,
to try our cheeseburgers.
Some spit them out.
Some fall in love
with ketchup and mayonnaise.
And though many of them don’t sound like me,
I like all the accents in New York,
being squeezed on the subway
between Puerto Rico and Gabon.
People are liquid flowing across the world,
are rain, and storms, and crying,
are mostly water that mostly dreams
of freely rolling into open spaces.
Freedom is easy to define: a child
drawing a picture of the soul
will often give it wings. A child
drawing a picture of home
would like a cookie when she's done.
Bring us your tired, your poor.
Bring us your buttered naan,
that shit is good. America is the idea
that America is an embrace,
a hug, a cup of cocoa in an icy world.
Bring us your hand-made skirts,
your irregular verbs, your imitations
of geese and Ferdinand Marcos,
your desire to be one of us. How flattering,
we will say. Those whose parents
raised them right, who watered them
and kept them in the light.
The people who made
the people who made
the people who made
the people who made me, etc.,
are alive in my flesh,
and through my fingers,
type the one thing
they want America to know:
thank you.