This is … My Rewrite of Emma Lazarus’s Poem

I regret that it’s time for this again.

Some of you may have heard a song I wrote for the Möbius Street album entitled “Mother of Exiles.” This phrase—Mother of Exiles—was immortalized on a tablet installed in the base of the Statue of Liberty in New York Harbor that, to this fraught day, carry the words of the poet Emma Lazarus in a work she entitled “The New Colossus.” This work was once believed (by my great-grandparents, no less than the society that put it there) to exemplify the “Amer...