Gill Garrett

Wye Valley, South Wales, UK

Gill Garrett lives in the Wye Valley in South Wales. She has twice been awarded the Gloucestershire Writers Network poetry prize at the Cheltenham Literature Festival and her work has featured in a variety of journals and anthologies. For several years she has performed with the Festival Players at the Cheltenham Poetry Festival)

Poem completed 21^st April 2020

Potter’s Field, Hart Island

“Give me your tired, your poor ...” Emma Lazarus, 1883

This is a site of historical interest too –

but there’s no new Colossus here,

no lady lifting up her lamp beside a golden door.

The consumptive, mad, the bad boys

of the Bronx, those with no other place

to call their own, the babies born asleep -

for centuries, in life and death,

the rejects and rejected

have washed up on this shore.

And now, when families have no place

at bedside or at burial, it’s the loved ones too -

New York City’s huddled masses

yearning to breathe free.