Immigration

                                                                                                        Robert Ronnow
                                                                                         Communicating the Bird

                                          Immigration

I like immigrants, immigration. Legal immigration,
Jane passionately corrects. Actually my goal is a borderless world.
Gathering the neighborhood like family.
The men discuss sterilizing welfare mothers. I say You're working around the edges,
humanity has exceeded the carrying capacity of the planet,
even those with jobs. And spouses. And houses.

Yet it's an idyll of an early summer evening, new cut grass,
two baseball teams of children playing in it. Safe from Pakistan.
News photos of Muslim refugees, women in blue robes, biblically
carrying children away from holocaust. The fundamentalist army
not far behind, beheading sinners, sure in its righteousness
as the Holy Roman Empire.

Somehow Joel Osteen the evangelist comes up
while talking about how the Catholic Church is irrelevant in North America,
even Latin America and Africa are going evangelical.
Izzi likes Osteen, awesome extemporaneous speaker, no teleprompter,
up from bootstraps message. My wife says he's probably Jewish.
Fortunately no one claims the Holocaust never happened or slavery was voluntary.

What is the carrying capacity of the planet?
In China is it each couple or each adult that gets one offspring?
As life expectancy and standards rise,
family size diminishes. We draw together into greener, tighter cities.
The children of three monotheistic religions, atheists and agnostics
play in city streets, work farm fields, explore forests, deserts, grasslands, space.

Two ancient female poets: Enheduanna and Sappho
were a revelation. The clarity of their complaints:
lost lover, lost city.