Home Sweet Homeland

30 Replies

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Give me your tired, your poor, Your huddled masses yearning to breathe free, The wretched refuse of your teeming shore. Send these, the homeless, tempest-tossed to me, I lift my lamp beside the golden door! The Statue of Liberty-Ellis Island Foundation, Inc.

Home Sweet Homeland

In homage to our homeland, we must keep it homogenous.
Protect it from the homeless, the homos and androgynous.
Being a homo sapien is not enough for entry.
To preserve our bonhomie, you must be white or gentry.
Now that you’ve ruined your homeland, must you come ruin ours?
Swarm across our boundaries? Infest our sacred towers?
“Send these, the homeless, tempest-tossed” is seen as just a homily.
For the present powers-that-be, it’s only an anomaly.
America’s our “Home Sweet Home,” but it’s not meant for you.
We have no place for immigrants of your particular hue.

 

For the dVerse Poets prompt to write a poem making use of a Polyptoton. See other poems written to this prompt HERE.

30 thoughts on “Home Sweet Homeland”

  2. Glenn A. Buttkus's avatarGlenn A. Buttkus

    Incredibly wry and sassy, you worked the dickens out of “home”. The truth within your message is hard to accept, let alone swallow; but there it is.

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  3. Frank Hubeny's avatarFrank Hubeny

    Nice lines: “Send these, the homeless, tempest-tossed” is just a homily.
    In the present situation? A mere anomaly” with all the repetition of “hom” throughout the poem tying it together.

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    1. lifelessons's avatarlifelessons Post author

      Frank, reading your comment with its quote of my two lines, I realized the rhythm was off so I changed those lines. Thanks. When I first wrote it, I was hurrying to get the post done as my writing group was coming to my house for a luncheon meeting and I had to get the pizzas in and the coffee made. So does poetry suffer for the practicalities of pizza. It sounds better now.

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  9. Rob Kistner's avatarRob Kistner

    Interestingi approach to the polyptoton here Judy — I enjoyed this, 🙂. …but it chaps mt as the way we treat some folks. So far from thr land of thr free.

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  11. kim881's avatarkim881

    As I read your poem, Judy, I had a Gilbert and Sullivan style melody in my head. You really went to town with polyptotons of ‘home’, and bravo for saying it as it is! Or is it?

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    2. lifelessons's avatarlifelessons Post author

      I had to read it again to see what you meant, but you are right. A broadway tune immediately came to mind and I was singing it to that tune, but I can’t remember the name of thesong. There is a hilarious man who does spoof songs to broadway tunes and he often uses this tune–but I can’t remember his name either, although I’ve reblogged a number of his spoofs. Is there hope for me?

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  12. Xan's avatarXan

    So much going on here– wonderfully rendered rhyme scheme, perfect meter, the parody of course, and then there’s the epic response to the prompt.

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