Yearning to Breathe Free
Kathryn Jones
January 8, 2021
An acrostic golden shovel merges two forms. In acrostic poems, the first letter in each line spells a word or phrase. In this poem, the phrase is “Give me your tired, your poor, your huddled masses.” In golden shovels, the last word in each line is borrowed from an existing work, often a poem or song. In this poem, the last word in each line is the end of the bronze plaque inscription and date on the Statue of Liberty from the poem “The New Colossus” by Emma Lazarus.
Go out into the wildness, my friend, and give
Into your desire to lose yourself with me
Validate your existence, discover your
Embedded strength; do not give up when tired
Make yourself forge ahead, focus your
Eyes on the riches, remembering when you were poor
Young, and restless, determined to set out on your
Own; remember that your ancestors in caves huddled
Unaware that someday there would be such masses
Running amok, and cities, and technology, and still a yearning
To return to places with no cellphones and computers to
Immerse the spirit in nature, to find places where you can breathe
Releasing the heart longing to soar, to be free
Embracing the sky, floating on ravens’ wings into the
Dawn filling the canyon, where the wretched
Yowling ceases and the rotting refuse
Of alleyways and streets disappears like a bad dream of
Urban blight crushing you; throw open your
Room’s windows, unleash the restless spirit teeming
Paddle a canoe down a river, ride a wave upon the shore
Or toss a message in a bottle to send
Over oceans proclaiming that you have discovered these
Rocks of ancient ages, handprints on cave walls, the
Ying and yang, a place of refuge where you will never be homeless
Or hopeless, cast away on an island like a boat, tempest-tost
Unfurl your passion to discover the heartland, to
Rest your weariness on my wings and fly with me
Hanging on to your desires and not falling, for it is I
Unafraid to bear you across the vast spaces and lift
Darkness like the drapes of my robe, my
Dreams for you burning like a glowing lamp
Lighting your way, skirting the shadows beside
Eden’s tent, following the path, marking the
Distance to the crystal shoreline, the sun’s reflection so golden
Melting into the water, the rays holding open the door
America, seek out the worthy and righteous again --
Say the name that means whole and universal, Emma
Say the name that means dead and resurrected, Lazarus
Enter the canyon, climb the mountain, open your arms every November
Stand like a statue with a torch, shouting those words from 1883
on January 20, 2021.
Kathryn Jones is a journalist, essayist, author, and poet. Her work has appeared in The New York Times, Texas Monthly, and in the anthologies A Uniquely American Epic: Intimacy and Action, Tenderness and Action in Sam Peckinpah’s The Wild Bunch (University Press of Kentucky, 2019) and Pickers and Poets: The Ruthlessly Poetic Singer-Songwriters of Texas (Texas A&M University Press, 2016). Her poetry has been published on tejacovido.com, in the Langdon Review of the Arts in Texas, and in the upcoming Odes and Elegies: Eco-Poetry from the Texas Gulf Coast (Lamar University Press). She is finishing a biography of Ben Johnson, the Academy Award-winning actor and world champion rodeo cowboy, to be published by the University Press of Mississippi. She was inducted into the Texas Institute of Letters in 2016.
