‘The Statutes of Liberty’ by Martin Hill Ortiz

The statue stands and holds aloft her torch,
the Kalahari moon, the Northern Star.
A lantern glimmers on a Southern porch;
a balefire beacon signals war. These are
unbroken shafts of light connecting lands,
a structure made of beams and pillars, shining;
Across the seas the planks of light expand.
Their longing and our prospects intertwining:
we carry home the children of the flood.
They salve and cure the fever in our blood.

“Build this,” she says, her shadow spans a nation.
We struggle, tire, and yet we carry on,
restored by our eternal reformation.
A land without a king, a place where dawn
reminds us that our freedom needs rebirth:
for liberty to thrive it must be stirred.
We’re all we’ve got, we share a lonely earth.
With newborn hope our future is secured:
undimmed, our flame of justice shines. In Rhodes,
Colossus fell, the gaudy god corrodes.

From out of Egypt, so I called my child;
those blown here by the tempest of the sands.
The still grim pilgrims trudge along, exiled.
We reach to grasp with labor-weathered hands
their hands. Forever leavening our dreams,
they bear the blessings of prosperity.
The immigrants appearing here in streams:
our ancestors and our posterity.
Their tide arrives upon our wave-swept shores.
We sit in darkness if we shut our doors.

Martin Hill Ortiz is a researcher and professor at the Ponce University of Health Sciences in Ponce, PR where he lives with his wife and son. He has three novels published by small presses: A Predatory Mind (Loose Leaves Publishing, 2013),  Never Kill A Friend, (Ransom Note Press, 2015), and A Predator’s Game (Rook’s Page, 2016).