Top Menu

Dear Reader, we make this and other articles available for free online to serve those unable to afford or access the print edition of Monthly Review. If you read the magazine online and can afford a print subscription, we hope you will consider purchasing one. Please visit the MR store for subscription options. Thank you very much. —Eds.

Disassembled Wonder

Disassembled wonder: crates and a box of jangling bolts,
instructions: how to build a liberty

Longshore cousins of a Polish leatherworker, Irish farmer,
olive presser from Spain queued since daybreak
(thermos of coffee and blood sausage on crusty day-old)
hoist the swinging puzzle blocks ship to dock

Thank you France for your daughter’s sandaled toes,
trim dressed torso, legs, torch-flexed arm, and mouth

mouth of the mother of the sculptor who dreams colossus

We wait to hear give me your tired your poor,
yearning to breathe free

but she is babe in the woods, not fully assembled
a bolted welded steel and copper, innocent iron

sheet over scaffold and air

(The Statue of Liberty arrived in New York in 1888 in 214 wooden crates)

Denise Bergman is author of Seeing Annie Sullivan (Cedar Hill Books, 2005), poems based on the early life of Helen Keller’s teacher, and the editor of an anthology of urban poetry, City River Voices (West End Press, 1992).

2005, Volume 57, Issue 07 (December)
Comments are closed.