Anthem for the Know-Nothings

I'm not a poet
And I know it
My writing shows it
After all, who the hell writes sonnets about immigration?

Writer's block continues, and I've resorted to bad pro-immigration poetry in the hope that the Vogons will respond with an offer of transportation. Ladies and gentlemen, I give you Anthem for the Know-Nothings.

That which in welcoming freedom once rose
And countless minds and empty bellies fed,
Walled off becomes a frozen moral close
In which we languish bleeding, dying, dead.

For what's the death and deadness of the dead,
If not in isolation hence to toil,
Forsaking breaking of the common bread
To claim a pious solitude of soil?

Can there be found accepted native oil?
Then crack the shutter on the lighted lamp!
And vigilant, shine wide around to foil
Those huddled swarming masses from our camp.

Let this, our damp and lonely hermitage,
In quarantine commence its final age.

(It's supposed to be a Spenserian Sonnet, but I wouldn't recognize iambic pentameter if it reared up and bit me in the ass. Well, hey -- after eight days, I blogged something, and that's, um, something.)